This essay describes how I have worked towards and performed four

This essay describes how I have worked towards and performed four

pieces of practical work using all three art forms. (Drama, dance,

music, and a final piece that is a mixture of all three arts

Performance studies

This essay describes how I have worked towards and performed four

pieces of practical work using all three art forms. (Drama, dance,

music, and a final piece that is a mixture of all three arts). Each

piece must be three minutes long and we have around two months to

improvise, rehearse and perform the four pieces. We were given five

‘key words’ to follow as a sort of guide line for our pieces. There

was a different set of guide lines for each art form. These consist

of… Music – rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, texture. Dance – motif,

action, relationships, dynamics, space. Drama – dialogue,1

characterisation, physicality, proxemics, tension. These fifteen rules

do interconnect between the arts which I will explain during this

essay.

We started our performance studies classes by learning about and

experimenting with improvisation as well as learning about the five

rules for each of the arts. We then began to look for the five rules

in our dance / musical / drama pieces. We experimented with the five

rules in our improvised pieces and all so broke down each of the rules

to find out exactly what they can cover.

Now we split ourselves in to groups and began to experiment using

improvisation for the final performance.2 In dance we sat as a group

and planned out linking moves that used all of our five rules, and

then put them together by improvising links. In drama we used

improvisation to create scenes and improvised the scenes endings, and

the drama in them. We also improvised characters for these parts, and

once we found something that we liked we would enhance it through

rehearsal and write a script. In music we used improvisation to begin

to create musical pieces. We created and re-created compositions until

we could find a sound that would suit the mood we were aiming3 to

achieve. In the mixed piece we had to firstly sit and discuss our

options and we decided to base it around a theme. Our theme was on

circles and squares, creating a piece about the trapped ness of a

single person, using the shapes as representatives of the person’s

feelings.

We did hit some problems during the creations of these pieces. In

dance we had a lot of people dropping out of the coarse so our group

ended up as a double act. But still we managed to capture all the five