Majorettes

Our troup a few years ago.

I have decided to write about majorettes and what it involves because its a huge part of my life.

The majorette troup i belong to is called Blue Angel Majorettes. we are based in Hemel and practise at hemel school. you can start at age three and stay untill your 18 when you can go on to teach and help out if you want to. Our troup is one of the only troups you will find that does not compete, we are purely a performance troup and thats the way i like it as its far more relaxed and theres never any real pressure. We dont have to wear uniform to practises the only real rule is no jeans and we call our teachers by their first names , there more like friends than teachers. I have some amazing friends there and in January 2011 i will have been going for eleven and a half years.

at the start of every year we learn a series of routines that make up our show. Your age and ability depend on what dance your in however our finale includes everyone. we will do the same show all year at at various fates and fields all over the place. The shows are almost always at the weekends and at any time. We also participate in carnivals and the same principle applies, we learn one routine that we do all year. However i enjoy carnivals a lot more as we aslso do party dances like YMCA, superman, the finger song and some seriously wierd ones i didnt even know existed,i think i must look really stupid but its a good laugh. This year alone we have done over 17different shows and carnivals, its not much really but it does take up a lot of your day, and were not finished yet i have a carnival later today and im just hoping it doesnt snow.

every other year we put on a huge pantomime at christmas and everyone loves it as its something completely different to what we useually do. The year when we dont do a pantomime we do an exam. And very soon we are having our christmas party which is exciting.

perfomring arts week begining 22nd November.

this week we continued to work on our performances for our show ' dance that means something'. we focused mainly on our group dances and duets. The group dance i am in is basically finished and from now on we will be working on polishing it so it looks amazing. for my duet dance im actually in a group of three. We have very nearly finished this dance aswell but there are some bits were not happy with as we think we can put in more technical moves which will properly be our main focus for the next week.

Aswell as the performance side of the show the planning and organization is coming along quite well. I am in charge of invites and so far ive written out what i would like them to say and on either monday or tuesday next week i will try and get some help from art or graphics to make them look really posh and nice. We decided as a group we would have a sort of a loose christmas theme with mince pies for snacks. IM really looking forward to it :)

last week...

laast week in perforing arts we were working on all the dances we will be showing in a production in early December. every dance we have learnt so far this year will be featured in the show and most of the routines are Dv8 based work. As well as that we are including our 'heartbeat' dance and a new one we recently learnt called 'ramalama' which everyone really loves! And the group dance that my group were struggerling with a few weeks ago is now almost finished and looking pretty good.  People are also doing dances from out of school im doing majorettes for instance. Also at the show all the work we have done in costume will be presented to anyone that comes along in a gallery sort of format. Im really looking forward to showing my parents what I've been up to and i think there looking forward to seeing what BTEC performing arts is all about. it should be great fun!

In costume we have been working on our fashion drawings again and everyones are just about finished now and they all look very impressive. were getting the materials we need to start properly making our costumes for next week so thats very exciting.

here is a picture of each of my fashion drawing boards. one is based on tartan the other denim.

                                                                      

lasst week in performing arts

last week most of our lessons were costume construction. We had to research denim and tartan for our homework so we fully understood the materials, as they are the main masterials we will be using in our final design. We also started doing fashion drawings. we had to draw a model ( or trace one) then draw our designs onto the model. we then had to detail the drawing so it looked like a real person and finally paint in the colours and textures. i found this really fun but it took me quite a while to make mine look like an actual person, once i had it looked pretty good. Everyone has two different drawings now and i think were completing them next week and adding some writting to the work.

In dance we split the whole class into two groups and we had to make up our own dance with an invisable object included in it. Our group found it very hard to get started and at first the moves we were using were very basic. But towards the end of our lesson we hadnt made up much of a dance but we had some very good ideas ready to try for our next lesson and im really looking forward to it. I think it took us a hwile to get started because everyone had different ideas but i hink we know what were going to try and do now.

legally blonde theatre trip

A few weeks ago I visited the Savoy theatre in London to see the musical legally blonde. It’s about a girl named Elle Woods who is dumped by her boyfriend for not being ‘serious’. She’s heartbroken as she thought he wanted to propose to her. Her ex boyfriend Warner (Richard Fleeshman) then gets into Harvard law school. Elle decides she’s going to follow him to try and win him back. So she stays at home and studies hard while all her friends enjoy spring break and eventually she finds she is clever enough to apply for a place. Instead of writing the required essay Elle puts on a huge production to try and win over the school and she does only to find Warner now has ‘serious’ girlfriend.

Elle finds out she is actually a very good lawyer and she enjoys it, throughout the show she realises she doesn’t need Warner and at the very end marries her best friend Emmet.

The show was amazing! The songs were all so catchy I was singing them all week and when the cast were dancing I didn’t know where to look there was so much going on. The set was very cleverly done and so much detail went into it. The lighting was pretty spectacular and really added to the effect of the whole show.

I thought who ever was in charge of costume did a very good job. There were a lot of costume changes for everyone in the cast especially the leads and a few of the changes were done flawlessly on stage! I really think the two dogs stole the show though. There were so well trained, I know a lot of time would have gone in to making them behave in the exact right way and they were so cute!

I would recommend this show to young girls mainly as it has a very girly plot. I do think boys that appreciate the theatre would enjoy this show as with all shows the amount of effort that must have gone into the production is amazing. I would definitely go again!