Final Film Evaluation of the Kathak Dance

 After watching my final performance of our Kathak dance called 'Dancing in the Street' which was performed on Wednesday the 14th of June 2023 at the Suffolk One Spotlight showcase event. I am proud of what I achieved in this performance, particularly my use of some of the physical skills with my balance, strength and flexibility being distinctly the ones that I feel I executed to a high standard; my use of these skills really went a long way to add to dance and to be more true to the style and the overall storytelling aspect of the piece. This is supported by feedback from the audience such as: "Your balance was good" and "I had never seen the style of Kathak before and found it fascinating." Comments such as these highlight how I demonstrated these skills effectively to add to the Kathak dance and create a good performance.

I was also very happy with how I achieved such a good performance through disciplined rehearsal, achieving a polished high quality outcome. I feel this really helped to improve my movements and overall execution of the piece and gave the discipline to perform the dance multiple times to such a high standard; this is again supported by the feedback of the members of the audience with them remarking: 'It was impressive how disciplined everyone was' and 'It looked very clean and tight and well-rehearsed'. These comments show just how effective my disciplined rehearsals were and how they paid off creating a tight, sharp and well put together performance that impressed the audience.

Finally, I was also very pleased with my learning of the Kathak dance elements (the bols and tatkar, chakkars and mudras). I feel that I have improved a great deal on these elements and these have gone a long way to improve my performance of the dance and has allowed me to tell the story to much greater detail and effect. Once again, this is supported through the audience and the feedback we were given by them, with some saying such comments as: 'I loved the story and that there was something to follow' and 'I understood the story'. The fact that the audience understood the story and had positive feedback about really goes to show how effective our use of the Kathak dance elements were in the storytelling aspect of the performance.

By watching the film of our final performance, I also recognise that there are elements of the piece that I could have improved upon, in particular I think that I could have still improved on my posture during the piece, I could see that the alignment of my spine wasn't as straight as it could have been and this suffered at particular points in the performance. However, I do have to acknowledge that I have improved on my posture a great deal throughout the rehearsal process and I can see a clear difference between one of the earlier performances and the final one. In my final performance, I could clearly identify the greeting sequence as being a section where I could have still used improvement as I feel I was still leaning to far forward and my shoulders were arched at times.