Crowd

 Crowd is a teaching performance piece  that can be remade  on new groups.
I originally made it over 4 weeks with 30 BA dance students at Laban, Deptford during September/October 05 and  with students at E15 acting school a few months later



We gathered movement material from observations of public behaviour at train and bus stations {for the Laban version the performers spent an afternoon observing and gathering gestures and fragments of behaviour of corporate people in public spaces at Canary Wharf). These fragments were brought back into the studio and shared through show and tell.
Over four weeks, working every afternoon/ we made a performance from this material by moulding it into repeatable rhythmic patterns and structures based on a 36 beat bar/phrase ( which can be divide into bars of 2, 3, 4, 6, 9 and 12 giving many possibilities of different speeds. This 36 beat phrase with all its variations and polyrhythms ran throughout the pieceso the dancers wereproviding there own sound to the piece. The sound of bodies working
We translated the found movement into action, rhythm, gesture and facial expression and breath into voices and  song, taking the mundane gathered pieces of behaviour and recreating it firstly authentically and naturalistically, then fitting it into the 36 beat rhythmic structure. The work involved working very closely together, building dialogues using simple forms, such as call and response - to complex polyrhythms involving the whole group.
Crowd eventually ran to about 20 minutes and was performed in a traditional theatre settings and  outside as a piece of public art by the GLA building, Tower Bridge.

Crowd aims to:
1. Develop a sense of listening to each other, small groups within the whole and the whole group
2. Develop an ability to work with complex rhythms  in a relaxed concentrated musical way
3. Develop a sense of how to use everyday movement as a basis for dance
4. Bring together a conscious analytical thought process with a more intuitive improvisatory approach to performance
5. Helped the performers develop their sense of working together and  performing to an audience