Choreography: © Liba Kaucky October 2020 All Rights Reserved; Performance (Ballet; Ukulele): ℗ Liba Kaucky 29.10.20 All
Performance Rights Reserved
Happy #worldballetday
!
Today (29th October) is World Ballet Day so to celebrate I've written the first post for this blog and created a short video of me doing ballet en pointe.
Here are a few pointe steps I've been working on and then put into a very short sequence for the purpose of this video so they form a mini-choreography rather than just an exercise. I particularly took a keen interest in choreographing various forms of dance at 17 years old when exploring ‘A’ level exam subject options and so started to academically learn about dance, choreographers, creating your own choreography and writing/reading dance notation. I also loved reading scholarly dance journals around that time, to learn about various aspects of dance, including biomechanics and injury prevention for dancers. Prior to this, I’d only focused on the practical side of dance at a performing arts college where I trained and took exams from early childhood in ballet, tap, modern/contemporary and later learnt Jazz/Musical Theatre Jazz. I later took classes in commercial dance too because I’ve always loved it and I wanted to expand my dance skills and add it to the choreography I can perform while singing pop songs.
For me, I find that creating choreography out of my ballet exercises is also a way of making ballet practice, exercise, technique (whichever you like to call it!) constantly fresh and exciting both physically, and mentally as well as engaging me emotionally. It's also very useful to keep thinking in terms of remembering steps, which is also handy when I find myself working with a choreographer.
To add to the degree of difficulty, in this video, I'm accompanying myself on my ukulele, the newest addition to my family of string instruments and the baby of the family. The idea behind the ukulele is to create a character rather like the ballet 'Esmeralda' where she dances with a tambourine. I enjoyed learning a small part of that role with my tambourine in a ballet workshop (I'm wearing the same ballet costume as I did for that) so had the idea of switching my tambourine for my ukulele to create a different character. I began by envisaging a court entertainer for this choreography, similar to those we come across in Shakespeare, for instance. Hence, I felt that a string instrument fits this role. The sound of my Ukulele also reminds me of the sound of a harp accompaniment heard in some ballets, so I imagined this working well with the atmosphere, character and short storyline I was trying to create. I fell in love with the harp at a very early age when my parents took me to a restaurant and there was a harpist who was performing there. She was amazing and I wanted to be like her!
It's very much a work in progress and I'm continuing to expand, change and adapt this choreography by adding step sequences and including more chords and seeing what happens. I'll update my progress on this dance blog.
Nevertheless, this blog is about all forms of dance, with a particular focus on classical ballet, contemporary ballet; Modern/Contemporary; English and American Tap; Jazz, Musical Theatre Jazz; Commercial forms of dance. I’ll be exploring various angles of dance, ranging from the practical and staging/choreography side of dance to even the theoretical/academic side (eg aesthetics, philosophy of dance, choreographers).
If you want a singer, musician or a performer who can combine singing and dancing or acting, I can be booked through these two websites:
https://www.starnow.co.uk/libakaucky
https://encoremusicians.com/Liba-Kaucky
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