Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Initial Ideas)

1. What character work and vocal skills/performance skills have I applied, to give an effective group performance? Explain.

I think that in this rehearsal and performance i had a good energy throughout, this meant that we were able to set ideas as everyone was enthusiastic, because of this in the performance i think i had good projection, and made made a good amount of eye contract with the audience - this is important to be able to draw them in, especially as this is a very upbeat song and a lot of the energy comes from audience reaction. As well as this i think i had good communication with the other people in my group, as part of a musical ensemble it is important to show that everyone who is part of it to show they have a connection with each other. We did this by making sure we had regular eye-contact with each other to show the audience that we are one group rather than four soloists on stage at the same time. 

2. What am I finding challenging today?

At the start of this lesson i as well as the people in my group really struggled with the pitching and intonation of this song, we couldn't work it put by listening to the instrumental version, so we put on the version with vocals. After this we were still finding this challenging so we each took turns in singing the line to see if there was one person that was out however because we had sung this wrong at first it was hard to change it, therefore we asked Kim to come in and play the melody on the piano, after hearing the notes directly we were able to pick it up. After singing through this a number of times we were able to perform this right. 

3. What did I learn this lesson?

Although before this lesson i knew the song "Crazy little thing called love" i wasn't 100% sure on all of the words, this lesson gave me a chance to learn them so that when we block the song for the final performance i will be able to focus on my performance skills more such as projection, eye-line and facial expressions. 

4. How effective was my peer support and communication skills for the benefit of the group performances?

I liked the way how in this rehearsal each person in the group came up with ideas about how the song should be sung, who sung what parts and ideas for choreography. Firstly we played the song and each of us improvised movement that would be appropriate for the performance, each of us picked out a few things that we liked and started to put them together. This was very successful as each person in the group was very valuble in the contribution of ideas, we respected the way that everyone's contributions would be different and used this to our advantage, this meant that we were able to come up with different movement ideas that frequently changed formations that would keep the audience engaged.

5. How could our performance and preparation have been improved?

If we had, had more time to work on this we would have been able to come up with more developed choreography, we could have had more partner work and could have worked on timing that could have made the performance more interesting to watch. As well as this we could have worked on more interesting harmonies that could have improved the quality of our vocals, however i am happy with the way that we rehearsed and prepared. Considering we didn't have a lot of time to work on ideas we were able to have a full performance with basic vocals and choreography that if we were given the time could be developed further. 

6. What elements of effective ensemble skills did I apply in today's rehearsal? What elements do I still need to develop? - What impact did this have today?

• Focus - Because i had a good level of focus throughout the rehearsals and performance, i was able to learn the song and movement easily, although this was good in today's lesson i still think this could be improved more. This is because it is very important to have this in every rehearsal and performance so that you are always aware of everything that is happening around you, rehearsal schedules are often very tight and leave little or no room to go over things that have already been rehearsed so you need to ensure that you are always focused.
• Enthusiasm - I enjoyed this process as each person was equally committed, this means that the rehearsals were more enjoyable, meaning that everyone was more willing to contribute. I have been making sure that i am enthusiastic in rehearsals as i think last year this was not a strong point for me, however i think this has definatly improved. 
• Creativity - We thought about the style in which we wanted to perform this song in and figured that it sounded very fifties, because of this we experimented with jive movements such as flicks, piroettes and relevant arm and hand gestures. I think this worked well as we had listened to the music and each decision that we made, was related back to the song, which is what we needed to do.