Rent- 8/10/15- Santa Fe- Chair Duets

8/10/15- Santa Fe- Chair Duets
Me and Holly were put into a group and told to create chair duet of 6 movements (3 each). I had never done chair duets before so this was a learning experience but I managed to keep up. We began to devise these first few moments and we began to see a story developing even this early on of a couple perhaps arguing. We were asked to add more movements and the story that we had already in our heads influenced our other movements. We interacted a lot with each other and many of my moves involved me getting up from my chair and interacting with Holly sitting down, I thought that this would look interesting as it used different levels and it seemed to work well. The music being played in the back ground was Santa Fe and our movements were in time with it. We then pared up with another pair and became a small group and devised additional moves with two sets of chairs facing each other. I suggested we use diagonals to switch chairs with the other pair as i felt it would look more interesting than merely switching chairs with the person in front of us.

After we had finished polishing our whole chair duet/ performance the whole class were brought back together and we used the chairs to make two lines of chairs opposite each other, to represent a train carriage and we used our chair duets during the song. We played around with different ideas like acting normally (as if on a train) and then when the second chorus came in we would all do our movements but this looked a little messy and cramped. It also was very sudden as we all began our duets after acting naturalistic. I suggested we start quite naturalistic and slowly throughout the song our 'normal train movements' would become more dance and physical theatre centric until we finally performed our duets. We tried my idea and while it did fix the problem of suddenness it still felt cramped when everyone was doing their movements at the end. In the end we settled on the idea of different groups doing their movements one at a time throughout the second half of the song, which seemed to work best of all the ideas we had.