What is a Choreographer’s role in a Theatre Company?
Well my role essentially is to choreography all the movement based parts of the production. With a discussion early on in our theatre company we decided we would stick to strengths within in our theatre making and physical theatre came up as one of them. We didn’t know who much we would use it but we know that we are equipped with the skills for it.
While we were choosing names, ideas and styles of theatre at the beginning of the process we also decided on roles within the theatre company, I was given the role of choreographer and this was exciting as I saw it as a new challenge. I have previously choreographed a production before for the musical theatre society for their production of Wedding Singer (2014). However, even with that experience it was going to prove a very different. Not only did I work extremely close with the Director, throughout the entire process, we also prided ourselves on being a collaborative company and the input from the group was extremely valid during the creative process.
Why is a choreographer’s role in a Theatre Company important?
Depending on what the theatre company is creating then it will always depend on if the company needs one or not, but for ours it turned out to be extremely important with a majority of the whole performance physical/visual theatre. Every rehearsal I would take the cast and do a warm up routine that consisted of stretches and cardio to prepare us for the strenuous work we were going to do. With a background in dance I had already had warm up routines in my head that I had previously done and I knew worked so I didn’t have to do much research into it before we started as I’d already previously learnt it.
Did I do my job correctly?
I like to think I tried hard and worked well with both director and company and created diverse and new ideas while keeping my colleagues happy and not pushing them to something they wasn’t capable of. “Research is another aspect of preparing to choreograph a dance.” (Cerny Minton, 2007, 8) Research for me took me down many roots but the one I mostly relied on was the internet and other companies.
Cerny Minton, S (2007) Choreography – A basic approach using improvisation. 3rd edition. Leeds:Human Kinetics