Workshops

Rambert School, FD/BA Dance Year One  
March 2023

This was a pair of 1.5 hour long workshops for first year undergraduate vocational dance students at Rambert School. The cohort were split into two groups, half in each workshop session, and I delivered the same material to each. The students were mostly in their late teens, with slightly more women/feminine-presenting than men/masculine-presenting students in each group.
 
The workshops sat within a series for this group of students, on the theme of ‘dance, body and identity’. I tied this material into the theme by focusing on pleasure and play as a way to bring more of yourself, in all your messy complexity, into the studio.

Banner outside Rambert School's building in Twickenham

The sessions covered:

• Games designed to highlight connection, pleasure and presence, including Saving the Show (Davison, 2015) and The Secret Weapon Game (Wright, 2006)
• Structured feedback and discussion based on sensory observations and pleasure

Moment 1- Saving the Show:
 
Someone early on in the first group discovered the possibility of recruiting the audience to join in, after which almost all the other players did the same. Some moments of group play that evolved from this discovery included:

• A musical theatre vocal warmup
• A Graham class danced to the Bauhaus song Bela Legosi’s Dead
• A fashion show style catwalk, with dancers emerging from the toilets at one end of the studio carrying various objects; toilet roll, the bin, various sanitary products; as if they were couture accessories

 
I observed to the students afterwards that this was unusual, this level of pulling others into the shit with you, to which someone replied:

We do a lot of scary stuff together 
Journal extract, record of student observation: 27/03/23

It’s interesting that they regarded the game as scary; that feeling of being vulnerable in front of an audience, but also that they saw in that same audience the people who could make it feel safe for them again. By pulling other people up to share in the bafflement with them, they were converting them from a potentially hostile audience member into a collaborator.

Moment 2- Saving the Show:
 
Having seen how the first group approached Saving the Show, I added a rule for the same game with the second group, stopping them from getting anyone up from the audience. This time, we saw a much wider range of responses to the challenge of what to do when the music cuts out, and much more recognisable 'in the shit' clown-thinking. Responses included:

Rambert's anatomical skeleton- not that good at ventriloquism.

• Pulling out an anatomical model skeleton and getting it to tell jokes, with herself as the straight man (why did the toilet paper roll down the hill? To get to the bottom). Then delivering an impassioned speech about the need to raise funds to buy the school a better ventriloquist’s dummy. ​
• Performing a very beautiful improvised solo with hints of Nijinsky’s L'après-midi d’un Faune, as was suggested by the music, then breaking into a sassy pop song each time the music stopped
• Berating an imagined offstage technician, getting angrier each time the music cut out, culminating in the performer phoning his mum to complain
• A free-flowing rant in Italian, starting as an explanation about the choreographer’s intent, then again getting angrier and angrier, culminating in the dancer chasing an unsuspecting student from a different class out of the studio for having had the misfortune to come out of the toilets at the back of the studio at that moment 

Moment 3- The Secret Weapon Game:
 
We combined Saving the Show with the Secret Weapon Game, so that the dancer had an idea to hold onto when the music stopped. This gave some of the players a little more confidence to go further;

A little help helped- we can rely on dance, it was good to have some other idea to rely on, even if it was really tiny.
 
Dancing is my skill, I was thinking ‘what other skills do I have?’

Journal extract, record of students' observations: 27/03/23

One performer was clearly demonstrating to us the awesomeness of her earrings. She told us they came from her home country of Malta, nodding knowingly and seeming to demand our adulation. When our response didn’t seem impressed enough she was outraged, pulling the earrings out of her ears and dropping them on the floor in front of us in disgust, to howls of laughter from the audience. A classmate said later:

It’s like seeing part of someone, blown up 100%

Journal extract, record of student observation: 27/03/23

Which seemed to me a beautifully clear way of describing a clown persona, albeit one discovered quickly in the moment of play, and with an audience of peers who already knew the performer. We picked up on this idea of persona again in the discussion at the end, contrasting it to self and character (which we marked out as the territory of acting, not dancing or clowning), and talked about the parallels between finding ‘your’ clown and finding ‘your’ drag queen. A member of Rambert’s faculty who was observing the session said to me afterwards that the students have dancer personas that she can see in class and in performance, but that they tend to be very serious.

I took a couple of helpful pedagogic notes away from these sessions, around balancing freedom and structure to make a short session more satisfying for students, and also the success of the post-exercise discussion structure. Blog post to come.

The students' responses were mostly around freedom, vulnerability and being silly. They wrote:

 It was fun to watch others explore a side of themselves they don’t/can’t show within dance classes
 
Found it scary, where you’d think clowning would be fun or taking the piss. You have the responsibility to make everyone else laugh.
  
Feel connected with one another- open vulnerability
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Not doing a ‘dance’ is way more enjoyable 

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​Ethical Research Statement

This practical research was carried out with ethical approval from the Doctoral College at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Participants have all given explicit consent for their workshop activity and reflections (both verbal and written) to be included in the research write-up and on this research website. Where participants are students, not professional artists, I have used pseudonyms to protect their identities.
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