7/12/08 - Costume Crises

Holistica - 3-6pm

Holly Cassidy

Marianna Hitiris

Heather Jackson

Bernice McBride

Eilidh Newton

Jo Small

Erica Wilson

Hurray! We are all finally rehearsing together! And a great rehearsal it was too - we all worked on the Ganesha Dance, we are all quite confident with all the choreography for this now and it's just a matter of polishing, we will have time for this when Zoobin gets back.

We took about 45 minutes out of the rehearsal to all practice our solos, duets etc. The Quartet people have added counts to help with the speed and togetherness of the piece. We are finding this way easier than before. We have also created running order:

Eilidh & Jo - Duet (Jo remaining onstage with the violin)

Holly & Marianna - Duet (Holly remaining onstage ready for quartet)

Bernice, Erica & Heather - Trio (None exit, join Holly immediately for quartet)

Bernice, Erica, Heather & Holly - Quartet.

Ganesha dance.

Eilidh timed us with this running order and for all 4 pieces it took around 5 minutes. This will fit perfectly with Jo's 4 minute violin piece and with the Ganesha dance (7+minutes) we'll easily fill our 10 minute slot.

The only issue we need to address now is the matter of costumes. I got the saris from Mrs Basan this week and took them to Holistica. They were pretty big, but should be easy to adjust. Only problem now is getting tops to match. A few people returned their white tops to Zoobin after Bollywood Tyohar and we need to retreive them somehow. Eilidh texted Zoobin during the rehearsal to see if we could collect them from storage but I don't think this is an option. Mrs Basan has one white and gold top, which I could possibly collect, time permitting. We've all got to get lots of stuff together before the dress rehearsal next week...

30/11/08 - The elephants are losing their heads!

LA Fitness 12-2.00pm

Holly Cassidy
Marianna Hitiris
Heather Jackson
Bernice McBride
Eilidh Newton
Erica Wilson

Today we mainly practised the Ganesha Dance. Marianna hadn't done it before so we ran through it and practiced it a few times. We're all getting far more confident with the choreography by the end of the session. We also worked on a trio (Erica, Heather & me) and Marianna and Holly's duet. Taking the cue from Jo and Eilidh's magnificent rendering of the elephant trunk in their duet, we decided to focus the choreography of the trio on the hunting and beheading of an elephant in the Ganesha myth! Early experimentation resulted in Erica and I savagely 'beheading' Heather and carrying the 'corpse' offstage! Though a highly amusing concept, we decided that this would create more hilarity than anything else (plus the Ganas didn't carry the body away - they only wanted the head) so Erica and I had to settle for abandoning Heather's bleeding corpse onstage! Hahah!

Actions for this week are to contact Zoobin re Holly's plane tickets and the running order of the show and for me to pick up the costumes from Mrs Basan and re arrange the 14th Dec rehearsal for a different date.

23/11/08 - Duets and Quartets

Leeds - LA Fitness

Present:
Heather Jackson
Bernice McBride
Eilidh Newton
Jo Small
Erica Wilson


The rehearsal began with a review of the Ganesha dance we performed as part of Bollywood Tyohar during the summer. Erica played the BT DVD on her laptop in the studio. Zoobin recapped the Ganesha story and linked some of his movements in the dance to elements of the story.
After looking at the DVD, Zoobin led a warm up and advised us that we should all be practicing our contractions to get fitter!
Eilidh and Jo choreographed a Duet while myself, Erica and Heather practiced our Quartet from last week.

EPIC FAIL: due to unforseen circumstances (my ineptitude and inability to operate my own phone) the choreography learned last Sunday was NOT disseminated to the other three members of the Quartet!

The Quartet was understandably a little sketchy after the epic fail on my part, and we had to re-watch the video to jog our memories. Thankfully Erica took the video and will (hopefully) be able to email it to us all. We made a couple of slight changes to the choreography throughout the course of the rehearsal which we will have to clear with Holly at our next meeting on 30th November. We also put counts on some of the faster sections which seemed to make them much easier to execute.

Eilidh and Jo performed their duet for the group (which was great) and Zoobin gave some input then Heather, Erica and I performed the new-improved Quartet piece which Eilidh recorded.

We all then attempted to remember the Ganesha choreography from BT. Jo and Eilidh did not perform this dance for BT, but were familiar with most sections, the rest of us needed to refresh our memories. Eilidh recorded this too to help with remembering.

We decided to book our tickets straight after the rehearsal (I did! So did Eilidh and Jo!) so we all knew we would be on the same flight.

Actions!
Everyone is to book their flights.
Zoobin will email us all the order of the show outlined during rehearsal
everyone must work on their CONTRACTIONS!


Ooh! And look! Annabeth showed me how to put the video on!
Study hard girls!

16/11/08 - Ganesha's Story

Leeds - LA Fitness

Present:
Holly Cassidy
Heather Jackson
Bernice McBride
Erica Wilson

Before rehearsal, Zoobin met with us to discuss the show in Tilburg.
For this we will be working to produce a piece on the theme on the Ganesha mythology. As we were largely unfamiliar with the story, Zoobin explained the outline to us:

Ganesha is the son of Parvati and Shiva. but was created only by Parvati.
Shiva is the god of dance, the creator and the destroyer. Parvati is the earth mother.
Shiva was away from home, hunting in the forest with his ganas and Parvati was alone in the house. She wanted to take a bath but no one was around to guard her door. To solve the problem Parvati took some earth and fashioned it into a man and breathed life into it. Thus Ganesha was created. Parvati set Ganesha to guard her door and went for her bath.
While Ganesha was guarding the door, Shiva returned and demanded access. Not recognising Shiva as Parvati's husband, and obedient to his mother's wishes, Ganesha refused. Shiva grew angry and threatened Ganesha, but still Ganesha would not leave his post or allow Shiva inside. Shiva fought with Ganesha and cut off his head.
When Parvati discovered this she was enraged and told Shiva that unless he brought her son back she would bring about the dissolution of the worlds. Shiva and his ganas went in search of a replacement head for Ganesha. The first living creature they came across was an elephant so they killed it and took the head for Ganesha.

Zoobin asked all of us to work separately and think of one or more aspects of the story to create a short piece of dance.

Notes:
Ganesha/ obedience/ guarding/ thresholds
Linear movements. Prohibitive gestures (flat mudhras?)
Horizontal motion parallel with stage front denoting threshold.

All four of us presented our individual pieces to Zoobin who commented and suggested changes. He then took elements of all four pieces and merged them together.
Zoobin recorded the full dance (around 2 minutes) so we could learn the movements.

Action: Distribute video via email/ phone message to Holly, Heather, Erica.