Northern Rascals- Sparkies

As part of a company formed through university known as ‘Flight Effect’ we took part in an intensive dance week with a company called Northern Rascals. This allowed us to experience what it’s like to be part of a professional company and gave us contact with a new formed up and coming dance company.

Whilst also taking part in workshops we created a dance piece called ‘Sparkies’. This piece was about an alternative world where creatures known as the sparkies lived. Our job was to be technicians who look after a lamp and ensure we are following instructions from our boss. Throughout the piece we all began to establish our individual roles through our personality traits allowing the audience to identify the different characters within the piece.

This was beneficial for me and a major step into becoming the dancer and performer I am today. It allowed me to gain confidence trying a different form of dance. And it also allowed me to find the playful and fun side to me when creating work as this is something I’ve never done before. All my training has been very structured whereas this was very experimental and included a lot of improvisation throughout the creating process.

Feet Off the Ground is a post graduate company created from students who attended London School of Contemporary Dance, they use a lot of improvisation and contact within their works.

When we worked with this company it was my first time doing improvisation with an outside artist which made me feel nervous at first but throughout the intensive week I became more comfortable and they also helped me to not judge my own movements. Whilst improvising they gave us the task of passing energy between me and my peers which helped me use my imagination more.

From the improvisation tasks, we created a work which was all about energy in our bodies and passing it between one another. This was a very fun, energetic and physical piece which I enjoyed performing in. I would have loved to further develop this piece as I feel we could have done a lot more movement from the energy task.

This work gave me an idea of what it was like to be in a company as even though we created phrases of movement, they mainly directed us and created the work on us. This is my preferred role within a company as I prefer being a performer over the directing role.