A photo from the live performance at the festival!

Overall Performance Reflection:

For my end-of-transition festival, I and many of my year 8 peers have been working towards an end-of-transition dance that was choreographed by Ms. Narelle Codalonga. This dance was based around some puppets and toys who were trapped but became free as the dance evolved. In this performance, I was pretty happy with how I managed to learn and cope with the interesting moves in which we had to do, the movements that we did were uncomfortable but they were meant to be awkward and uncomfortable as it helps to create the character of a puppet/toy. As a whole group, I think we did great, as we all worked together to make the performance feel alive and we all worked as a whole and made sure that everyone was ok and knew the moves that we had to do. For this performance, we worked on the common which was difficult and had some struggles e.g. the sun in our eyes, the hill, and the concrete/rough ground. All of these were things that I and everyone had to cope around and try to push through it and focus on the dance. I am usually used to dancing/performing on the stage which is a lot easier as you can get the perfect lighting and the ground is flat and smooth which is perfect for many different movements and actions. The one thing that I will take away from this is that no matter where you are and no matter the problems, just push through and just have fun with what you do and enjoy it with a smile on your face!

My personal reflection on how I went:

I was pretty happy with my performance. I must say, I was kind of nervous beforehand, as I was at the front of the triangle/v’s and I had never been at the very front for something. It was also pretty scary as when you’re at the front, you can’t see what people are doing behind you so you could be a beat behind or doing the wrong moves and you wouldn’t know, and that’s what I was afraid of. I overcome and just believed in myself and I was able to do it without hesitation, and I was proud of myself afterward. In the dance, there was a part where we as an individual got to choose what toy we wanted to be and had to create moves that were staged and had a beat to them. For this, I chose to be shooting a basketball, as I love playing basketball but I also thought that no one would do it, so I could be different and be myself.

The prosses

The process of making this dance wasn’t too complicated as my class has a period of dance on Monday and Friday, where we would learn a new part of the dance each lesson. The first few lessons, it was focused on getting us into the mindset of a puppet and how to act like one and also getting to know the awkward feeling of some of the moves in which our dance might enquire. The next few weeks were about us woking in groups and making some moves that would be used in the dance, these few weeks helped me to gain some collaboration skills while working in group settings. After the first 4 weeks, we started putting our dance together and figuring out some moves and ideas to make our dance look awesome. Throughout this whole prosses, there were ups and downs. Some of the ups being that we go to learn a new style of dance and we got to all work together, some downs were that some of the moves were harder for some than others, but we all persevered and helped each other to figure out the dance.

The ending of our dance! 🎉