Thread: How to teach this.......?

Don't know how to name this thread better to explain my situation... However, I have to teach a group of about 20 girls a choreography where they are a girl in a middle with one group on her left and one on her right side. Then, some parts all these 3 groups dance the same, but almost one half of choreography they dance different things, or some parts are made like question-answer between groups. So, how can I teach them this choreography most effectively?

Whever I've done anything like this, I've found it easist to try and explain my vision before I make them learn all the different stuff. So even if they don't know exactly what they are supposed to be doing immediately, they know what they are aiming for. (E.g. "we start with two groups and the red team will be moving *this way* and the green team will be moving *that way*, and they all get together and pair of so each pair has one red and one green.

You'll need to decide whether you allow everybody to pick a "team" and stick with it, or whether you make everybody learn all the different parts so they can fit in wherever they are needed. Personally I let them choose their own team, and stick with it. Some weeks it doesn't balance so well, but mostly it works, for me & my students. YMMV, as they say!

Once they *kind of* know what they are supposed to be doing, I find it helpful to make one of the group (one at a time) stand out and watch the piece from the audience's point of view, so they can see the overall resuts of the groupwork.

Good luck, I know it's complex, but once they get it and they can see the results are amazing, your students will be thrilled to be part of it.

I think the best way is to divide into sides up front. It's easier to learn multi-role choreographies the way you will perform them from the beginning than to learn a choreography one way, then relearn it a different way. Of course, this assumes you have a stable group. I was in a class once where this wasn't the case, and the students who started learning the routine were evenly divided, but by the time the performance drew near, the group had deteriorated into four "rights" and one "left."

Personally, I think the best approach is to create a choreography that is mostly "variation by orientation," than to do a lot of mirroring or complex alternating. If you incorporate moves like hip circles or vertical figure 8's where you emphasize one side and travel one direction, then rotate 90 or 180 degrees and work the other way, you can create all sorts of interesting expanding and contracting patterns on stage simply by having your dancers start facing different directions. Everybody is doing the same move, starting on the same foot/hip, but it looks different to the audience. This way makes it easier for dancers to switch and fill in gaps in staging as your group changes, because they don't have to relearn the moves themselves, just the way they are facing when they do them.