Culturama is an amazing experience, especially in terms of the strong collaboration as the final performance is a group dance. I work with my partner Daniel C to prepare and do the choreography for our dance. We had started planning since the end of last school year. This process was quite smooth generally, because we are both very passionate  and have some knowledge and understanding towards the dance, which made us easier on choreographing. However, one difficulty we faced is that when teaching the dancers, we had different ways of how to teach. I preferred to teach the hand movements and feet movements separately, while Daniel wanted to teach the steps all together. This made the dancers a bit confused about what they should do and who they should listen to, which slower down their progress. This occured because our communication wasn’t efficient. We realised that we need to discuss and plan before each teaching session as communication is a crucial part in the collaboration. Therefore, after that, we teach effectively and the dancers can clearly understand and follow the instructions.

Furthermore, we need to work with our dancers and teach them how to dance collaboratively. As a group dance, we have many changes in formations, and people need to always be aware of the others and adjust their positions in order to fit the formations. I understand that this is quite difficult because they need to dance at the same time, which could be very distractive and even forget how to dance properly. To overcome this, we need to be very focused and familiar with the steps. As dance leader, I asked my dancers to practise the dance again and again at home, while I realise this is also difficult because our dance is a partner dance, but the people only see their partners once a week for half an hour. Because of the limited time, the dancers couldn’t have enough time to practice with their partners, which makes the collaboration less effective.

Overall, collaboration is a crucial part in Culturama. I need to work collaboratively with my partner to plan the performance and the teaching sessions, as well as working with the dancers in order to make them more synchronised and dance better. In future, I could be a more effective team player by making a clear schedule of ‘what we are going to do’ and ‘how to achieve’ in each session of the project, so that it would be easier for everyone to understand the instructions. I also should communicate more with my partners or group members to discuss everyone’s opinion beforehand, so that we wouldn’t have conflicts while doing the project.

LO5: COLLABORATION (Working Together to Achieve An Outcome)