Jake Drouillard

3/13/14

Musical Theatre Dance II

The process of choreographing a dancing was very interesting and eye

opening. Just like directing it is difficult to truly see how difficult the process is from

the other side. I found it to be not overly difficult to come up with the dance itself

due to my rekindled love of swing. I was able to use my knowledge of swing to come

up with a relatively simple but impressive looking swing routine. In its nature swing

is rather easy to set to music most moves fit most music and count wise it is always

on whole beats.

The issues came once I actually began to teach my dance. Unfortunately we

took a tad too long learning the other dances and didn’t balance out our time

causing an overlap of two dances we needed to finish in one week. This time

restriction caused me to not be able to get the smoothness I would have liked but

my dancers still were able to make the dance look good and any differences looked

to be stylized and not due to lack of comfort in the dance. I did not realize how much

I’d have to teach but I was lucky to have a group that picked it up quickly. The other

issue besides time that I had was when I had originally imagined this in my head I

had not thought about the physical differences between a male lead and a female

lead, this specifically refereeing to strength and height. Normally in swing the lead is

a man and there for taller and stronger and in this case one set of moves proved

difficult using all women that move was a leap frog over then a pull through the legs

unfortunately I had to change that on the fly to two leap frogs because my leads

weren’t strong enough.

The reason why I chose to do this dance for this song is that in this song it’s

all about showing the aristocats the fun of being a swinging alley cat. In my mind I

saw that small cats getting kind of into the singing mostly the little girl during the

song proceeding the dance then once the dance starts the I’d have the alley cats

show off a bit until later the kids mimic what they had done in the beginning of the

dance break as the alley cats do more elaborate dance moves. Eventually Tom Cat

would get the mother aristocat to dance with him just before slowing down into a

walts or other slow dance, I didn’t analyze the slow section to see if it was ¾ or 4/4

time. I imagined a bit more free stylization that I didn’t have enough time to work in

to make it look more impressive without adding difficulty.

All in all I found this to be a very fun experience and very eye opening. I think

I will greatly benefit from this especially next term in choreography and I might

even expand on this in that class if possible.