It is now the beginning of February, and this week we were lucky to be joined by dance teacher and choreographer Elizabeth Foster. She took the group through some warm-up activities then looked at how dance can symbolise different feelings and how the body can interpret these. We have looked at the term ‘separation’ in previous sessions so we worked in pairs to represent this feeling through dance. In contrast, we symbolised loving feelings and togetherness through dance also. Liz took us through different styles of music and how we can represent both of these feelings through completely different musical styles. The activities helped us to understand how the dance group in Wutterpal might interpret our musical composition in different ways.
One member of the group commented that the dance was produced from her body without much thought about what she was doing; the moves came from the soul as a response to how the music made her feel.
In the second half of the session, we looked at the words ‘ella’ and ‘gloria’ from the previous session and, in groups, we experimented with the phrasing and melody of these. By the end of the session, we all came together and recorded the different parts moving around each other. Richard added some sections on keyboard and we were very lucky to have one member of the group bring in her bassoon. She listened and responded to the other musical sections in the group, and the result was incredible. We recorded this so that we can use the melodic and harmonic ideas in our composition.