My Dance Summary

Summary of My Dance

Title: Solar Yoga - My dance makes use of yoga movements and typical classical Indian dance movements to worship the sun.

Music: Om Namah Shiva by Jah Wobble

Description: Motif 1: A tray like movement with the arms, one arm is carried across the body followed by the other arm. From either right to left/left to right, depending on the direction that the dancers are going to travel in.

Motif 2: A wiping action, where the hand sweeps across the opposite arm, from shoulder to arm, to lead in to the next movement.

Main Choreographic Devices used:

· Wipe motif is performed sometimes with one hand sweeping across the other arm, but later changes to have the opposite hand

The second stimulus was a yoga book (Yoga: Mind & Body - by the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre). While reading this book, I noticed pages on the Sun Salutation, which I thought had good positions that I could incorporate into the dance. There were also some simple asanas (movements) in the book which I thought I could include in the performance.

Appraisal: I felt the idea of using the sun as a dance idea would be very good because not only would I be able to develop my dance using relationship, action, dynamics and speed, but I would also be able to have a focus in my dance which I could communicate to the audience. I thought that communicating with the audience is quite good because they can see that the dance is about worshipping the sun, and not only a collection of dance movements. Yoga comprises of many stretches, which I have included in my dance, but the main asanas (yoga movements) asanas that I used were "The Tree", where your left foot is flat against your right knee. I developed this by changing the level and making dancer 2 do it on the floor. Another asana that I used was "The Triangle". I didn't actually include it in the dance, but

The last asana I used was "The Cobra", which is one of the movements in Surya Namaskar. Dancer 2 did the position exactly as it was supposed to be performed in Surya Namaskar, but I developed this with dancer 1 by having one of their legs in the air while they balanced on their arms and other leg. Snake like movements helped me to develop "The Cobra" asana, for example, when the dancers swing their arms from side to side to show a snakes undulating motion. I changed the position of the focus from down stage centre, to down stage right, to finally up stage centre. I think this was good because as the sun moves across the sky, so does the focus.

The music is quite slow at the beginning and then becomes faster later in the dance because it enabled me to contrast the same movements but with different dynamics, for example, the tray motif is performed much faster when the music goes faster. The main problem I found with the dance was the ending. The music didn't have a definite ending until after 5 minutes and there was no way for me to edit the music, so