Moves en Masse is people movement, mass choreography and parade direction on a big, big scale. With a decade of experience in large-scale event and parade design, planning and production, we've moved over 50,000 people. MeM was created by Jane Miskovic and Anna Wheatley who have choreographed and coordinated many groups in Australia and internationally for Olympic-sized events. No matter what or how big the idea, we can make it move.
Moves en Masse has recently accepted the contract to manage the Parade of Athlete’s for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies for the PanAm and ParaPan Am Games in Guadalajara, Mexico – 4 parades in total. Approximately 6,000 athletes from 42 nations are expected to compete in 36 sports.
We will join the international team from Five Currents Productions to direct and produce the 4 parades, supported by a local team and as always, an army of fabulous volunteers. We are so looking forward to the challenge of working on these four huge events and have already started learning our American flags and Spanish phrases!
Late afternoon mid February 2011, a call came through from the one and only Ignatius Jones, Australia’s King of Creative Direction, “I need you to develop a “moment” in Taylor Square to highlight marriage equality, can you do it, I know you can”. Jane replied without drawing breath “Of course we can, Moves is on the job!”
One week, no rehearsal time, 700 volunteers (the majority with no formal performance or dance training), 4 drag queens, 2 drag kings, Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard bobble-heads and one sister of perpetual indulgence…WE’RE NOT GOING TO MAKE IT! Moves was on the case editing the music with the sound mixer, liasing with the Australian Marriage Equality float and all the supporting floats on timing, sending DVDs of dance moves for the Taylor Square Show as it was now being called. The Mardi Gras Parade stops once every 5 to 10 years to highlight issues of significant to the LGBTQ community or indeed its own anniversaries.
Mardi Gras parade day arrives, our Moves en Masse team is assembled by midday for the briefing about who will manage which float, how to stay out of foxtel jib’s sight and when to reign in the political bobble-heads…it may have rained, the floats may have been late but my goodness did we have a blast when the show got going. All the volunteers were incredible, picking up the chorey at the last minute, what they may have lacked in technique they made up for in enthusiasm! After the madness of the 3 minute show, the Moves team collapsed at the rear of Taylor Square and enjoyed front row seats for the rest of the parade. A huge shout out to the fabulous Moves team, Naomi Young, Matt Henry, Darrin Peters, and Erica Nelson. Mardi Gras 2012? Bring it on!
We arrived in Muscat, Oman, to commence working on the 40th National Day celebrations. We only have 12, 000 Omani children and adolescents (!!!) to move en masse in various sections to help create the ultimate celebration for his majesty, the Sultan Qaboos. We are working with a fabulous and experienced crew incuding director and designer of the show, Steve Boyd, with the charting and mass choreography team of Bryn Walters, Gina Martinez, Rocky Smith, Nathan Wright, Nikos Lagousakos, Fadi Mobayed, Wael Mowad and the wonderful Soha Frem.
We are slowly adjusting to the heat and humidity and have worked hard to learn some Arabic. There are looks of astonishment when the kids realise you are speaking to them in Arabic. They love being our language teachers as we teach them their moves. We have also found the local people to be so friendly and welcoming. Jane and I got stranded on a median strip the other day and these two local women stopped and insisted on ‘rescuing us’ and drove us back to the hotel!
There are 7 weeks to get this show rehearsed, with a crazy schedule to fit in several hundred schools into rehearsals for 12 different segments. The segments that we are working on include formations that celebrate the local history, culture and achievements of Oman over the last 40 years. In the final segment we have all 12, 000 cast members together in a beautiful flower formation, where the boys and girls have to be separated by ‘moats’ of at least 2 metres. This is fine in theory but when the boys get adrenalin-fueled and keen to impress their peers the temptation to transgress these moats was all to tempting…not a good look to the Omani officials in some of the rehearsals. By show time however, the presence of His Majesty will be enough to curb these tendencies!
Jane joined an international team from Scotland, the UK and the USA to work with 350 Glaswegians on the handover presentation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony in Delhi, India. After a very successful Games, the Indian people handed over the Commonwealth flag to the city of Glasgow who will host the Games in 2014, and Glasgow accepted it in style.
The most wonderful part of the handover ceremony was the 350 strong volunteer cast who ranged from tertiary dance students to council officers to parks maintenance workers and represented all local council areas in Scotland. The cast worked so hard during the 3 week intensive boot camp to become an amazing performance team who presented to the world a Glasgow full of pride, passion, spirit and dedication.
Jane worked with Nathan Wright and specifically choreographed and trained the cast in all the large-scale cloth movements of 68 tartans and put the whole piece together with Gina Martinez and Rocky Smith who created amazing movement with illuminated planks and giant silver inflatable pieces. As a team, we constantly adapted the prop pieces to create a maze, a labyrinth, multi-coloured tartan, the Scottish flag, the River Clyde, the Clyde Drain, the Armadillo, a Celtic knot and Nessie, the Loch Ness monster! Jane live directed the 10-minute segment by cueing the cast via in-ear radio receivers.
This amazing segment was created by Glasgow Life and Mark Fisher, Sara Donaldson and Catherine Ugwu for Unspun Productions, with technical production by Piers Shepherd and costumes by Jilli Blackwood. The whole segment was put together by Steve Boyd who created the scenes, designed the props, rendered the choreographic charts and directed the rehearsal process.
Both the people of Glasgow and Delhi were so warm and inviting and so proud to share their culture and spirit with the world, and it was a privilege to work on such a wonderful project.
MeM Team: Nathan, Naomi, Anna, Darrin, Alysia &; Sarah
The general public auditions for Ben Hur took place on Saturday the 28th of August and Moves en Masse played a key role in its success. After Jane spent hours perfecting the plan, incorporating several rewrites to the original schedule, the team was amassed and the day ran like clockwork. Anna managed the entire day on-site with military precision. As a result we had close to 400 auditionees who had fun right from the start with a Zumba warm-up led by our own Sarah Kennedy, followed by charging and marching up ANZ Stadium’s field of play in the spectacular sunshine.
Anna & Nathan raring to go!
The day was organised with five groups of auditionees that were managed by the Moves team, Anna, Naomi Young, Darrin Peters, Alysia Hodges, Sarah Kennedy and our incomparable emcee Nathan Wright. The whole team arrived at 7am for a briefing and later met with all the crew from McGregor Casting and AG Productions before we opened the gates to all the eager hopefuls. Within each of the five groups we had journalists planted to document the entire day for both print and broadcast media. Cameras followed the progress of the day, and chose a number of auditionees to interview about their experience. Initially everyone made their way onto the field of play, with the most dramatic maneouvre a full charge of all participants across the width of the field right up the full length of ANZ Stadium, the sound was deafening and their enthusiasm palpable.
The work of the Moves en Masse team was elegantly efficient, in fact with the fantastic production and casting teams the day was a joy for all! Moves was delighted to receive some fabulous feedback on the day from Andrew Guild, one of the producers of Ben Hur from AG Productions,
‘The day was absolutely perfect! The logistics that you designed and put together worked perfectly. A huge thank you Jane to you, Anna, Nathan and all the boys and girls of your enthusiastic, competent and positive team. From the moment you came into the project until the moment your team signed off yesterday afternoon, all of us at AGP and ANZ were given such a strong feeling that our important project was in good hands. The auditionees, all the other management groups and the press were mightily impressed.”
Auditionees charge down the field of play!
Warming up to Zumba
with Sarah
Two of the Moves team were invited to join the production as assistant choreographers, which was testament to their flawless work on the day. For Jane, the next move is Glasgow for the Delhi Commonwealth Games Handover Ceremony, then October sees Anna and Jane joining the Oman National Day team coordinating tens of thousands of small Omani children singing and dancing their appreciation to the Sultan…where else would you be?
Our first big gig involved the planning and onsite coordination of the professional "Ben Hur - The Stadium Spectacular" auditions at Stadium Australia in early July.
AG Productions, a company "specialising in the presentation of comedy, ballet and music – but then won’t rule anything out", engaged our services for this unprecedented stadium spectacular full of gladiator fights, chariot races and a 40 meter ark, the production is fresh from the French StadeFrance creative team to Sydney’s Homebush bay. This will be the first production presented by ANZ Stadium and they are presenting the show in association with AG & StadeFrance. The whole production team is fantastic and we wish them all the best with this grand production.
The first three days of the auditions saw us corralling and directing would be gladiators, women pirates, lepers, soldiers, merchants and more and more ferocious gladiators! Auditionees were required to devise improvised combat scenarios, yelling their lungs out while “charging the ship”, dragging one foot behind them as our bacterially challenged lepers, and sashaying the runway as seductive noble women.
We worked with the incomparable crew from McGregor Casting who expertly registered each auditionee and had them all colour-coded so beautifully into their groups that it was impossible for them to become misordered, misplaced or mystified about the requirements and obligations of auditioning! Go McGregor Go!
We have yet to plan and implement the final day of auditions for Ben Hur, which it is believed will engage over 500 members of the general public, and take place on the hallowed field of play at Stadium Australia! Hooray! While for a sensible, intelligent individual this would be enough to inspire a keen desire to run and hide in the isolated foothills of the Himalayas, we crazy mass choreography freaks are enduring sleepless nights in eager anticipation of this monumentous gathering of would-be soldiers, lepers and pirates. CHARGE!!!
Photo courtesy of Steve Boyd for David Atkins Enterprises and VANOC
This is Jane's latest work, the Closing Ceremonies of the Olympic Winter Games Vancouver 2010. "Anthem" had 1000 energetic teenagers running from a pulsating mosh pit to using their snowboards to create amazing stadium animation. The piece was conceived and directed by the genius mind of Steve Boyd and the whole choreographic team worked with the students over the Winter to set the stadium on fire.
Moves en Masse formed in July 2010 and is the exciting new venture of Jane Miskovic and Anna Wheatley. Together we have 15 years of experience working on large-scale events both in Australia and internationally. We decided it was time to focus on creating our own business to follow our passion for working with large groups of people in both a creative and a logistical way (and challenge both the right and left hemispheres of our brains!)
We have many exciting plans for the rest of 2010 both at home and overseas, from the UK to the Middle East, working with a few hundred Scottish young adults to tens of thousands of Omani children....yes, we agree that sometimes the work can seem overwhelming but never do we shy away from a challenge to coordinate and choreograph copious quantities of enchanting crowds! Ha!
We will be updating the blog regularly so that we can keep all of our interested parties up to speed with our MOVEments! Here's to an exciting second-half of 2010 :)
Photo courtesy of the Performing Arts Unit of the NSW Department of Education and Out There Productions.
This was Jane's first big moment in mass choreography, co-choreographing this section the Opening Ceremony of the Pacific School Games in 2000 at the then Stadium Australia with Liz Moss. Ten thousand students took to the field of play in a mass display of colour and movement after just one rehearsal.
