Its our motto... HAKUNA MATATA! Musical theatre 2K17

As the day of the performance nears closer and closer, we are getting ready to get our show done! That involves lots and lots of practise, which is exactly what we did today! Also today was what our school calls a mufti day, when we wear no school uniform. So today there was a little buzz in the air! 

We have been learning our cues (when we come onstage) how we come onstage, how to pronounce and act out our lines, and how the show will run in general. So today we had a run through of the script, which involved a lot of line reading and acting, as well as waiting for our cues. 

Since I am very organised, I have already some-what learnt all of my lines. The  think I need to work on the most is the expression I use. So far I am doing sort of well, I am using my expression well, but I think that I could do a bit better with staying in character. 

After going through the whole performance as a practice, I am sure that we are going to nail this performance.  My next steps are to stay in character and to use my expression more. But so far our group has been doing very well. 

Practice, practice, practice! A.K.A showbiz

Today for musical theatre, our day was full of ques, costumes and speaking. Today we all went through the musical. Practising lines and figuring out where to go. Everyone had to be very flexible with changing what we where doing. We all had to cooperate and listen in order to be able to quickly learn all of our lines and our ques. 

Today we practised all of our lines while staying in our character, figuring out how our characters moved and talked. If you want to find out how I want my character to move and speak, check out my other blog post Here. 

Today everything was very fast paced and fun. We all had a good time and everyone was cooperating and there was minimal mucking around. 

Costume ideas for Festival of the arts 2K17

Today I came up with a few costume ideas for my character for musical theatre. Here are some costume ideas that I have for my character Scar in the Lion King musical, I hope you like them...

Science of the arts 2K17

Aim:  I want find out what forces are acting on a dancer's body,  I also want to find out if dancing actually does improve brain power.

Research:  In a word, dance can improve brain power. Dancing opens up new neural pathways. Neural pathways are what basically create memories and process remembering things. The neurons are cells that take up and process information through the electrical and chemical signals. In order for human beings to be able to react to their environment, neurons attract stimuli which is a detectable change in the internal or external environment. For example, the burning of a finger at a candle flame, is transported by the ascending neurons to the central nervous system and in return, the descending neurons to stimulate the arm in order to remove the finger from the flame.  Dancing also improves blood flow to the brain causing you to remember things better and just improve brain power in general.

Forces and motion  The forces on dancers when they are dancing ballet...

- Gravity (downwards)

- Support from the floor (upwards)

- Friction from the floor (sideways)

(The frictions is the force that resists relative motion between two bodies in contact)

Spin forces

-  Angular velocity (how fast an object or person spins).

-  Rotational inertia (the inertia of a rotating object). An inertia is a property of matter when it remains at rest or in motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force. To put it simply it's a tendency to not move or change.

-  Angular momentum is rotational inertia times angular velocity. If an object has a large angular momentum, it's hard to stop spinning.

Torque

- Torque is a measure of how much a force acting on an object causes that object to rotate.

- Essential for spinning, torque is very important in ballet because a torque determines balance.

- If your torque is greater than zero, then you’re angular momentum may change, causing you to fall over

What is balance?

- No total torque and no total force. No total force is needed so that momentum does not change.

- No total torque is required so that the angular momentum does not change.

Centre of gravity

- The centre of gravity of an object is that point at which the object will balance.

- The entire weight may be considered as concentrated at this point, hence the name.

- In order to stay balanced, the centre of gravity must remain directly above the area of contact with the floor.

- If the area is very small, it will be harder to balance. For example, a dancer on pointe.

How can a dancer keep in balance while dancing?

- What’s the trick that keeps the dancer balanced when they are turning?

- The rotation axis should not wobble around too much.

The relevant quantities of turns are

-  Angular velocity is how fast an object spins

-  Rotational inertia is the inertia of a rotating object

-  Angular momentum is rotational inertia times angular velocity

-  A change in angular momentum is equal to torque exerted on an object times the duration the torque was acting on.

Force

• When a dancer’s force is pushing upward from the floor to the foot,  it is acting on the same vertical line as the force of gravity pulling downwards and the force of friction pulling outward, it uses Newton's 3rd Law of Motion- "For every action, there is always an equal and opposite reaction."

Perriouete

• Pirouettes are a rotation where the dancer supports themself with one leg, while the other leg is in retire position.

How pirouettes are made

• A pirouette is made by having a preparation followed by a rotational force, or torque, exerted against the floor. the torque on the floor against the dancer causes angular acceleration.
• fifth position has a small distance between the feet, thus a larger amount of force is required to do a pirouette, while fourth position has a larger amount of space between the feet, so it requires less force to produce the same turn.

Arabesque

• The supported leg is vertical and the other is extended behind the ballerina. An arabesque has more inertia than retire position.

Plie

• To apply vertical force in an upward direction, out of the ground, a dancer bends her knees in a position called plie.

Grand Jete is an example of projectile motion

• A grand jete is an example of a jump combined with projectile motion (meaning it’s a travelling leap). It begins with an initial velocity which will decrease as the dancer rises into the air until it (the velocity) reaches zero. Zero velocity is the maximum height.

Friction

• Friction is the force that keeps us standing without slipping. Friction is a horizontal force pulling across the floor, while gravity pulls down into the floor and the dancers foot is pulling upward out of the floor. If your foot is stationary on the ground, a large horizontal frictional force is possible, but when the foot is moving, the potential force is much smaller. Friction is a ballerina's best friend.

The concept of jumps and leaps

• Accelerations and forces are a part of all jumps
• Gravity acts vertically downward on the body of mass (our body)
• You only remain motionless if there is a vertical supporting force to your weight
• To jump off the ground, the dancer has to exert a (downward) force greater than her weight.
• The height of a jump is based on the downward vertical distance where the force is put off.

Why are dancers hair in a bun?

•  While spinning, dancers use the technique of spotting to keep them in a strait line. An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an unbalanced force. Dancers keep their hair in a bun because otherwise, while spinning, their hair whipping around their head acts as an unbalanced force.

Experiment/research plans 

Why do you spin slower when your arms are out then when they are in front of you? 
Would you spin faster with your arms out on lino or in on carpet, and which if these options would make you fall over first? 
How do dancers not get dizzy? 

How do dancers not get dizzy 
While spinning, a dancer uses the technique of spotting to keep them in a straight line. They find a spot on the wall to look at to make sure they do not get dizzy. The goal of spotting is to maintain constant orientation of the dancers head and eyes, to the possible extent. They do this is in order to prevent dizziness and enhance control. As the dancers turn, spotting is performed by turning the head and body at different rates. When the body rotates smoothly at a constant speed, the head moves much faster and then stops. The dancer will fix their eyes on a particular spot.  

Why do you spin slower when your arms are out then when they are in front of you?
When a dancer draws their arms and legs and a leg inward, they reduce the between the axis of rotation and some of their mass. This reduces their moment of inertia. Since the angular momentum is conserved, her rotational velocity must increase to be decreased. To put it simply, the total amount of things that are spinning in preserved. The further out something is in the spin, the more it continues to the angular momentum for it's speed. Hence when you bring your arms towards the centre, you spin faster. 

We are getting so close! - Fourth day of musical theatre

Today for musical theatre we went through the script and our animal characters. 

First of all we started off with our usual warm ups, which include mini mini ma, papas gotta ping pong ball and our dance. But we did start a different vocal warm up. This time it was a different tune and an "ooo" sound. 

For something different we started going over our lines... which was quite exciting considering that I have one of the leads. We basically just went over what expressions etc that we should use. 

Since my character Scar is the villain, I will have to act scary. In the movie, Scar kills his older brother in order to become king. But there is just one problem, he doesn't manage to get rid of the kings son Simba. That is what stops him from becoming king. 

*What is your animal? My animal is Scar the lion. 

*What does your animal look like? Scar is a lion that has dark brown-red fur, a coal-black sleek mane, heavy-lidded, sinister green eyes, and arched eyebrows. He is long and lanky to the point of being thin and weak, with a scar across his left eye, which was given to him by a cape buffalo in Boma's herd.

*How does your animal move? If you look at a clip of Scar on youtube Here you will notice that Scar has a long stride, that looks slightly elegant. I will try portray that. I will bring some more femininity to Scar character. 

*What are your characters personality traits?  Scar is highly intelligent and charismatic, able to rally the hyenas to his cause and gain their loyal trust. Since he has a quite elegant stride, I will try and portray that. I think that is quite important to do. He also has quite a posh-ish sounding voice. He is quite confident, until he has to fight. When he is in those situations his quite often runs away. 

It's a lion! Third day of musical theatre

Today, Thursday the 16th of November, in preparation for our lesson, we had to get changed into our P.E gear as today, we would be doing a lot of moving around.


The first vocal exercise started off with a simple 8 count warm up with Miss Richardson and our other warm-up that is "Mini mini ma, Mini mini ma, mini mini, ma ma ma ma ma" repeated over and over. This both really help with singing higher parts and overall warming up my voice. I find the mini ma one is an easy way of warming up.

The third warm up we did was a short yet hard vocal exercise called:  Rossini: William Tell Overture: Final. It is a iconic race tune.  You first have to sing the verse, "Papa's gotta ping pong, gotta ping pong ball" to the tune, which seems simple enough until you try it with the dance moves. Start with your right arm, start with it up then pull it down to the beat, a simple 1, 2, 1, 2. Again, still seems easy. Then with your left arm, start with it up, then pull it so you're pointing to the side, then down. Now put it all together. It's super hard to sing and control your arms at the same time. But when you d musical theatre, it's really important to be able to multitask. 

After we were all warmed up, we played Space Jump,  space jump is an improvisation game where the main aspect is to have one person start out doing something like, let's say, bouncing a ball. After a random amount of time a judge or teacher says "Freeze" or "Space Jump." That person then freezes for the next person to come up and create a new scene based on the pose the last person was in. But to put it simply, here's a video with an example, and probably a better explanation. 

After that we did some choreography to Hakuna Matata, which will be a song sung by Nathan and Desharn. We all have gotten a hold of the choreography and we have all leaned a small fraction of the songs.

Quick update... I got the part I wanted. I am so thrilled to be a lead in this musical and I hope I add a bit of scariness to this musical.  

Second day of Musical theatre FOA2K17

Second day of Musical theatre

What have I learned today?
Today I have learned how to use your diaphram when singing. I learnt that in order to sing higher, you need to loosen up your diaphram. We all learned a range of different vocal warms up, as well as what the Broadway show looked and sounded like.  I'm so excited to be able to be part of the show. 

What am I wondering?

At this point I am wondering whether I got the part for my favourite character, Scar. I would like to be scar because of his personality. I normally would go for a female role. But since Scar has such a large personality, I would love to be his character.





Link to the circle of live song

The link above will take you to  the live Broadway show performance of the circle of life. This show is spectacular and would have taken a long time to rehearse. The colours of the costume to the strong voices just changed the whole atmosphere. Thats what makes this show so amazing.  As you can see, the Broadway outfit for Scar is out of this world. The colours of the costume contrasted really well with the set. 



Here is a photo of our day... 

First day of Musical theatre FOA2017

Today for the first day of the festival of the arts, I started my journey in the Art of musical theatre. The musical we are going to perform is The Lion King.

Although the final product will be a performance of The Lion King, when signing up for musical theatre, you're really signing up to do three things; singing, dancing, and acting.

First of all, we played some theatre sport games, the games we played where... tequila, magic mirror, copy clap and 123. We played all of these games to improve our theatre skills.

Secondly, we did some singing.
Our vocal warms up lasted a few minutes to warm up our vocal chords and prepare us for singing. Then we got into two groups - altos and sopranos, and sang a short song from the Lion King. I was an alto, we sang the low part of the song and stomped out feet to stay in the rhythm.

  Another thing we did was choreography, as there will be a lot of dancing involved. Lining up in rows, Ms Beer first taught us choreography to the song "Can't Stop The Feeling".The second dance we did was thriller by Micheal Jackson. The cool part was that we had to act like zombies, all of this was really fun and different from other things I've done. 

One of the opportunities we where given is a solo and main acting role. Personally I would like to be either Scar or one of the Hyenas mainly because I like being scary. My next step is to audition for the role of a character. I really hope I get a chance to be one of the characters I want.

Cybersmart Pixel art!

During cyber smart today, we did some pixel art using google sheets! This is my pixel art! If you would like to know how to use google sheets for pixel art. Look at my friend Jaime's blog... hhsjaimeb.blogspot.co.nz

She has some useful tips on how to use it! 

Border security and why its important

This is a piktochart that I have made about Quarantine Officers role in Bio security in New Zealand.