A dance workshop with London Contemporary - Dance Saturday

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, 

Last week on Saturday, I had a virtual contemporary dance workshop with London School of Contemporary Dance. My dance teacher at college is kindly giving us the opportunity to work with dance schools, artists, and companies from across the UK and London Contemporary and Dance Ed are to name but a few places. I guess one of the main positives of online learning is being able to quite easily meet these sorts of people without having to go all the way down to London or anywhere else just to take a class. It did mean that I had to miss a Project 21 lesson but I'm just volunteering at the moment and everyone understood anyway that this was optional but also quite an important part of my course. 

It was quite fun actually. My class was led by a man called Baptiste and he is one of the many dance teachers at London Contemporary. We first learnt a simple phrase to just warm up our bodies and it consisted of rolling down into a press-up position for 8 counts, moving our backs and rolling our heads, before coming up into a standing dog position, and rolling back up for 8 counts. I think I'm kind of liking contemporary warm ups more and more now that I'm getting used to doing them at college. Granted, we're currently doing more theory work with everything being online but when we were in the studio physically, I liked the yoga-style introduction into the class and the meditation at the beginning. It really warms up your muscles and brings you into the class which I'm really beginning to like.

For the rest of the lesson, we just worked on a few technical phrases. One of the phrases consisted of rolling the shoulders one by one, then coming into first position and doing plies whilst circling the arms. The other phrase was a lot more balletic. It consisted of tendus, lunges, arms swoops, and plies. I didn't get all the movements completely right at first but once you let the music be in control, the steps were easier to execute.

We finished the session with some improvisation work which is a really key part of contemporary technique. Many people think that contemporary is quite rigid, technical, and well-structured but actually, it's more about letting go of the tension and being free in the music. We were told to close our eyes during the last few minutes of the session and move how our bodies wanted to move to the music. At one point, we were told to pick three parts on our bodies and move them one by one, connecting them to points of the music. It took me a while to get into it at first but after a while, I found myself quite naturally moving the way that I wanted to. It was quite fun moving with my eyes closed. I didn't bump into anything thankfully but its a nice feeling to dance for yourself and not anybody else.

We finished the session with a Q+A with some of the students at London Contemporary. It was nice to see so many people from so many different countries. There were students from France, Sweden, and the Czech Republic. It was a bit like the college I'm going to now because it's very international, inclusive, and accepting, which I really liked. I also liked the fact that the school accepted dancers from different dancing backgrounds. They accept strong contemporary dancers, prima ballerinas, people who've only done hip-hop and break dancing, and even jazz dancers. They look for the love of dance when interviewing applicants for their school and I really respect that about them.

Overall, this contemporary workshop was a lot of fun. I learnt a lot about technique and performance and how to be myself when I'm dancing. I'll definitely look to London Contemporary for post-sixth form opportunities.

Have you ever taken a dance workshop before? Let me know in the comments below and I'll be sure to reply to them. I ♡ hearing from you!

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Bye,

XOX, Juliette 

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