‘West Bancroft Side Story’ - Choreography 101

I woke up Saturday morning to a limp, aching sensation in my legs and my roommate refusing to get out of bed.

Maybe that doesn't seem like the most relevant fact; it probably isn't - but the consequences of Friday's 12-hour preparations for the Sunday filming of "West Bancroft Side Story" were probably fairly attention-grabbing, right?

Maybe the attention-grabbing part was the whole 12-hour bit.

While most of the cast members didn't arrive until afternoon, I first reached the practice room at 10 a.m. to start making decisions. The first scenes we had decided to film took place at a dance on-campus.

When filming anything, it's important to take specific things into consideration: lighting, the position of the actors, the background – the list goes on and on. When filming a musical, there are other things to keep in consideration, namely the big C-word: choreography.

Choreography was the word of the day on Friday, since about five hours were spent specifically on learning dance moves for the two large numbers in the scenes we filmed.

The process of filming a musical scene, at least in WBSS, begins with the music: before anything else can happen, the writer first writes the music – in our case, simply rewriting or adjusting lyrics from an existing song. From there, the choreographers can start looking at the rewritten lyrics in combination with the music files to start working on the dances.

The WBSS crew is very lucky in the sense that we had not one, but three choreographers on-site: T'Relle Smith, a senior majoring in exercise science; Megan Meyer, a junior majoring in pharmacy; and Jennifer Hughes, a freshman majoring in film. The choreographers, who are also featured dancers in the production, made the entire process much smoother.

Friday's practice was dedicated to two scenes of dialogue and two choreographed music numbers.

The first song we worked on was the title song, "West Bancroft Side Story," performed by the lead characters Joey and Sonia near the end of the scene. The dance for the song was actually a ballroom dance called the rumba, which leads Megan Beckett and Nick Kneer learned for the filming.

Both of them picked up the dance very quickly, and we moved on to the biggest challenge: the choreography for the main song, an adaption of Sean Kingston's "Fire Burning," which included the full cast and ensemble minus leads.

The song is a performance by Tyler Holtzman in the role of Munich, who has a crush on Sonia. The choreographers had to take in consideration the stage at the front of the room, as well as the number of ensemble members involved in the scene, when they made their plans.

To make the task easier to manage, the choreographers broke the song into multiple parts, giving each group of cast members different choreography. Different groups included the Quad ensemble and a divided ensemble of men and women as well as the full ensemble performing together.

The choreographers worked from the ending – the full ensemble – backwards through the song in chunks, managing to keep the attention of the cast for hours on end. Since I wasn't going to be in the ensemble, I could watch most of the proceedings from on-stage, which was the direction that the camera would eventually face.

When the big day finally arrived, the producer decided to tackle the large number first. Since the cast had to perform the entire routine for the sake of the camera without pausing, they had to perform the same dance two times back-to-back – not counting the number of practices done before the filming.

In all, the cast performed the dance on-camera three times.

Choreography is not the easy part of filming a musical. In fact, it's not even the not-so-bad part of filming the musical. Ask any member of the cast, from the leads to the extras: it's one of the most time-consuming parts of the process, although the end product is one of the most interesting.

All I can tell you is that no one from the WBSS cast is going to want to hear Sean Kingston anytime soon.