First of all this is a creative movement piece that my friends and I created in our drama class:

In my Drama class we have been completing a creative movement unit. This unit has been a really fun unit for me because it is something that i usually don’t get to do during school. I got to be creative and think about how some movements can be exaggerated and how, such as different movements like plodding, twirling and waddling. At the very end of our unit we were told to pick groups. I was in a group with two of my friends. Our assignment was to choose a song to create a creative movement piece to. All groups had to use at least one prop, My group used headphones. Before we started the main assignment of this unit we prepared for it. Our class focused on different types of movements and in what situations you would use them in. We practiced a scene using creative movements and one prop. In my group we chose our scene to be a sport activity center. We used a sarong as a prop for a canoe, parachute and a skipping rope. While we were in the process of starting our major project in this unit our Drama teacher shared with us a planning sheet on google docs. This sheet helped my group find out our storyline.

The song that we chose was freak the freak out by Victoria Justice . This song’s lyrics is about somebody who is never listening. My groups story line is about somebody who has never been heard and no one ever listens so they wanted to share what they could hear. We show this by one of my friends in my group, Alina, is using headphones the rest of our group is acting like she isn’t even there. When Alina comes in and bangs in to the two of us, Layna and I, we act like we weren’t expecting that and we stand up to go ask her to stop. Instead she doesn’t seem to notice that we are there. As soon as she takes her headphones off and un-plugs them we can finally hear her. After a while we start to dance to the beat of the song. At the very end of the dance Alina puts her headphones on and Layna and I sit down like nothing had ever happened.

Creative movement is not like dance so my group had to combined dance and creative movement together to make our sequence. We tried to make the creative movements look like dance. It was hard because some movements were jerky and smooth. At the very start of the song we used a lot of movements that were jerky because we needed to show people nearly being hurt, by accident. In our performance we had to include these things:

1.asymmetry
2.symmetry
3.balance
4.use of level, body position
5.beat/rhythm/timing
6.jerky/smooth movements
7.fast/slow movements
8.clear movement transitions between segments
emotion in your face, posture and gesture
9.start and end in a neutral position
10.open to the audience and show all movements, expressions
11.stay within the taped area of the performance space
12.the prop is used by all at some point
13.the sequence makes sense as a story
you stay in focus and don’t break character or flow

It was hard to include these things into this dance. Our group needed to use different techniques such as combining dance and creative movements together. My group needed to make an improvement in the technique of what movements we should use to move in-between dance movements.

This has been a fun, but difficult project. My group has found different ways to solve problems. One problem that my group came across was a technology problem. We needed to make an MP3 for our song, but we couldn’t find a proper copy. Alina edited our song because we needed to cut out half the song. It was hard because where we needed to cut out the next part of the song came in straight away. I think that Alina solved this problem by slowing down the process. She slowed down the song and then cut out the other half of the song. Another problem that my group came across is creative movements. We had three people in a group, because it is an odd number it was hard to think of a good interesting type of creative movement to show people.

I think that our group accomplished a lot of good things. I think that we included some of the things on the list of what we should include. Our group included asymmetry and symmetry. At the very beginging of the chorus two people do the exact same dance move while the other person stands in the back, that is symmetry. Half way through the chorus two people still do the same dance move, but one person roles forward instead, so I think part of this asymmetry. In our dance and creative movement sequence we use a lot of symmetry movements with two people, but at the same time one other person is doing asymmetry movements in the middle.

This unit has really helped me think about things in a different perspective about what creative movement is. I always thought it would always just mean dance, but the word branches out to different things. You can change the way you walk and run just by adding something like swaying your arms, making your legs go higher and more. In Drama class we performed our creative movement sequences. I got to watch others performances and i could see what they had done and i compared it to ours. I am glad that i could see other performances because those groups used different props so it was interesting to see exactly how they used them. I would have liked if I could have seen the process of how the other groups accomplished there creative movements. I hope that we continue learning new and unusual things throughout the years.