My Summer To-Do List:Blogging, Dancing, and French Speaking

        When taking the summer off from college, I wanted to go back to drawing board and re-evaluate how I wanted to spend my last summer break and fall semester. My plan was to strengthen everything: My writing, my french, my dancing, and my networking in general.

1. My blog has been keeping my fingers on the keyboard, but I have yet to work true hard news since spring semester. This is a forewarning that you may be seeing some local news somewhere on this blog. I love food and I love dancing, but I also love my area!

2. So far I have been started 12 sets of choreography and only completed five (It would have been 11, but I had spark inspiration after listening to "Harem Aleyk" by Natacha Atlas. I love all the songs I have chosen, so since my summer is getting closer to an end, my goal from here on is to finish the remaining dances for future uses. It'll be a fun challenge!

3. About a year ago, I finished my French minor and haven't been in a French classroom since then. I miss practicing my French so I use countless applications, movies, radio, and songs to keep the language fresh in my mind. In the future, I plan to post ideas, programs, and techniques I use that I believe are effective.

Let the games begin!

Troupe Blocking with Nail Polish (Update below)

       With many thanks to the La La tribal troupe leader, April, I have been given an opportunity to prepare a full piece for a show in the future. One of the toughest issues I am having so far is working on the dance without the dancers. This is where the fingernail polish comes into play. So far, it is the funniest yet most helpful ways I have learned to block dancers in choreography. After watching a recent episode of Game of Thrones (the heart-wrenching "Red Wedding"), I had thought using nail polish to block the dance would help make the performance clearer in my head as I made choices to move dancers around.

        The bottles were treated as bodies, meaning if I was not able to move the bottle in a new position efficiently, I could correct it. If I wanted one red color bottle (a dancer playing a specific role) in a particular position, I could practice blocking with the polish as much as I want, with the help of photographs from previous blocking. I used different color nail polish to represent a different person, took a picture of each change, and uploaded the picture to add text to the pictures. I will eventually need to put this to the test, so I will have an update on how it works.

Update: I have ran through all but one part of the group choreography. When it came to better understand the dancer's places, the nail polish technique was very effective. I haven't had a chance to tried the dance with the dancers themselves yet, but I feel the choreography will be better understood now that I see the transitions.

New choreography in process

    Very recently I have performed my own choreographed drum solo to the song "Desert Princess" by Hossam Ramzy. It felt amazing to complete a dance and present the finishing product. Now, I am ready to work on another choreography. It's different compared to the previous Triberet performances since this is more of a Tribal Fusion dance and I want the vocabulary to be smoother with more isolations. 

    Right now, I am in what I feel is stage two of choreography development. It is drafted, but nowhere near clean. I have  separated the movements into combinations to make corrections and practices easier. Since I prefer to save choreographing the opening of this dance for when I have a clear idea of my "story", there is no introduction yet.

    This experience should be fun since I am trying something different and challenging. I tend to gravitate towards using shimmies (hence my drum solo) but I want to focus on my underused movement vocabulary. I'll do my best to update on my progress.