This essay describes how I have worked towards and performed four pieces of practical work using all three art forms. (Drama, dance, music, and a final piece that is a mixture of all three arts

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Lee Rowlett

Performance studies

This essay describes how I have worked towards and performed four pieces of practical work using all three art forms. (Drama, dance, music, and a final piece that is a mixture of all three arts). Each piece must be three minutes long and we have around two months to improvise, rehearse and perform the four pieces. We were given five ‘key words’ to follow as a sort of guide line for our pieces. There was a different set of guide lines for each art form. These consist of… Music – rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, texture. Dance – motif, action, relationships, dynamics, space. Drama – dialogue,1 characterisation, physicality, proxemics, tension. These fifteen rules do interconnect between the arts which I will explain during this essay.

We started our performance studies classes by learning about and experimenting with improvisation as well as learning about the five rules for each of the arts. We then began to look for the five rules in our dance / musical / drama pieces. We experimented with the five rules in our improvised pieces and all so broke down each of the rules to find out exactly what they can cover.

Now we split ourselves in to groups and began to experiment using improvisation for the final performance.2 In dance we sat as a group and planned out linking moves that used all of our five rules, and then put them together by improvising links. In drama we used improvisation to create scenes and improvised the scenes endings, and the drama in them. We also improvised characters for these parts, and once we found something that we liked we would enhance it through rehearsal and write a script. In music we used improvisation to begin to create musical pieces. We created and re-created compositions until we could find a sound that would suit the mood we were aiming3 to achieve. In the mixed piece we had to firstly sit and discuss our options and we decided to base it around a theme. Our theme was on circles and squares, creating a piece about the trapped ness of a single person, using the shapes as representatives of the person’s feelings.

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We did hit some problems during the creations of these pieces. In dance we had a lot of people dropping out of the coarse so our group ended up as a double act. But still we managed to capture all the five essences with a certain level of grace. We4 used cannon in our piece. When rehearsing it in front of the class we learnt that we needed to improve direction in our piece and to make it ‘less robotic’. So, taking these words in to account, We improved on our direction and added some more ‘rounded’ expressions. In drama ...

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A detailed log of the rehearsal approach to these mixed art performances. I am particularly interested in how the writer combined all of the arts together in the final performance especially as this was perceived to be the most successful.