R&D Sharing

We were very lucky to have a great audience for the sharing who were very honest with their feedback, and also asked some very intriguing questions about the project. Everyone agreed that having a male performer playing a female character was not problematic. Everyone agreed that there was a lot of parody in the work and characters, and that sometimes this worked well as they could recognise and connect to the characters, but sometimes it didn’t. Several audience members commented that certain characters reminded them of children they knew when they were that age. One member did suggest we could either go even more to the extreme with the character parodies, or try and find characters more personally connected to the performers. Another member also brought up the question of authenticity in regard to the characters. This is something I had realised, and want to work more on the performers’ embodiment of their characters. The majority of the audience agreed there was too much text and preferred the abstract movement based sections. In particular, everyone seemed to like the slow motion trio and commented it was a nice moment for the audience to breathe and reflect. This also led to comments about the level of abstraction and ambiguity we might want to have in the work, which in turn will dictate the amount of text in the work and whether we use spoken or pre-recorded text. Another interesting question raised, which we hadn’t even considered, was the use of contemporary dance and disco dancing. A debate between the audience ensued as to whether it worked using two very different dance vocabularies in a piece. A member suggested that we could use the music to differentiate when the performers are disco dancing and when they are being more expressive. I believe that you can have both forms in the work, as long as there is a clear distinction between when the performers are expressing their characters and when their characters are engaged in disco. Other suggestions made were to make the manipulation duet and slow motion section more brutal, develop the alienation of Mimi’s character, place Kristal’s solo behind the line of performers to give a sense of the private and to make the slow motion section even slower. Finally, the sharing was wrapped up by two final audience comments/questions.  What do we want the whole context and direction of the work to be? And what audience are you creating the work for? These two questions have given me a lot to think about. The audience we will be targeting are young people and their families (we hope to have a participatory educational element to the project), and therefore the work we create needs to be accessible. However, I hope to make the work engaging to a contemporary dance audience too. In regard to the direction/context of the work I feel the most fascinating element of the theme are the children. When I first watched Strictly Baby Disco initially I was quite judgemental of the children, but as the program unfolded it was clear the children involved in the competitive scene are just that, children. They are just humans with complexities and characteristics, that happen to be disco dancers. And through their disco dancing they experience life issues that we can all relate to and empathise with.