Cabaret performance- Chicago Evaluation

On the 15th of March, our BTEC Performing Arts group performed a dance in Cabaret to 'All that jazz' from Chicago which we had been rehearsing for a while now.
I really enjoyed this piece, it was fun to dance as well as it looking very effective. Although most of the movements were generally small movements such as all turning your heads in the same direction as the exact same time, they were however very hard to get right. The dance may look easy and slow but its defiantly not, each tiny movement counts as a lot and if just one person at the back does something wrong, they will be noticed straight away.

I thought our performance was very strong all the way through, especially parts such as the line that we were all in at the beginning of the dance, we included a cannon which was performed to the right timings, we turned our heads and moved our legs at the same time we were supposed to which looked very effective and well practised. Also I think that the tap dancing with Kelly, Myriam, Shannon and Alice was a major strength in the dance, it looked great whilst we were all round the edge, it showed the audience that we do lots of different styles of dance and adds something unique into the piece. To add to the strengths, I think that the use of a prop (a chair each) was a great idea, its gives the audience more to look at as well as building up to a big finish.

During the performance there were a few minor weaknesses that could be worked and improved on if we were to do the variety show again. During the middle of the dance we all got into a diagonal line and then placed our legs on the persons hips in front of us and went round to the music, our legs could have been much stronger on this and could have improved our postures much better, some of our legs were not in time either so we need to work on the timing for this specific part. As a group we also need to make sure that we keep focused on where our heads are looking as its hard to forget towards to end of the dance.

Personally, I think that I need to improve on making my movements bigger and stronger as at the moment they are quite small, so next time I will need to make sure my arms are big and the same with my legs when we do kicks.

When we first starting choreographing this dance we were originally going to sing it as well as dance it however in the variety show we decided that we would just dance it so we could be marked on our dancing mainly. I don't think this has effected the performance majorly however if we did sing it may have been slightly more interesting for the audience to watch. As well as this it would have showed of much more of our ability of what we can do as a performing arts group. On the other hand we got lots of great feedback from the audience about what a great performance it was and how they loved it.

Here is a picture from the night of the performance:



There is also a video of the performance piece on  http://klsperformingarts.blogspot.co.uk/