Lesson 5 choreography
In this lesson we began to work further on our group piece for the choreography assessment. We discussed different beginning, middles and ends for our dance to help generate some different starting points. For example, we thought that our piece could begin with one dancer standing center stage slowly swaying back and forth performing small gestures and then each dancer would slowly walk in maintaining eye contact with the audience. Our piece would gradually build up to become more frantic symbolising the idea of how some people in mental asylums are unpredictable and sometimes are hard to control.
We also came up with a plan for our ending in which we thought all dancers could be performing in unison and then slowly one by one filter out leaving one dancer to continue and then suddenly drop to her knees to create a sudden shock towards the audiences. The music would then go silent whist the other dancers crowd around her heavily breathing.
Next, we thought of a series of different words in which we felt portrayed our stimulus, such as pain, trapped, worried, controlled, isolated and crazy. Following on from this each of us chose one word and created a short gesture which is a movement of part of the body to express an idea or meaning to represent it.
We then taught our individual gestures to each other and then worked together to make them bigger.
Here are some videos of the gestures we created.
https://youtu.be/L-_RQZqTtas
https://youtu.be/LW2cRON8j6w
https://youtu.be/9SaX493VmSQ
https://youtu.be/WTE2SxrgwSo
After we had completed this, we then began to design different formations for a couple of the gestures.
For example, for the phrase inspired by the word isolated we decided to perform it in a diagonal line with everyone dancing in unison accept the dancer in the middle who joins in a couple of counts later. And for the word trapped we placed a trio in upstage right and a duet in downstage left to perform the choreography in canon with the trio dancing first to then slowly turn to face the duet who danced second, we then repeated the phrase in unison facing each other diagonally coming towards one another.
I really like how you have thought about the beginning, middle and end of the piece as this is a very good starting point for your group. I also like the variety of words you chose for your gestures, how did you find this task? And do you think this is something you will do throughout the piece to create movement?
ReplyDeleteThank you Megan. I enjoyed this task as it allowed us to begin to see our dance slowly form together. I found it really helpful thinking of different words linked to our stimulus and then creating small gestures based around them, in then in which we expanded to make bigger. I feel during the process of generating material for our group piece we will go with the flow and create choreography in correlation with the music but I feel if we get stuck then this task we be really helpful to think of actions at a quick pace.
DeleteIt's really interesting to read about your ideas for the beginning and ending of the dance. I really like the idea of the music being silent at the end after the shock to the audience! At the end of this post you discussed how you've altered your gestures so they fit into the group piece. I was wondering if there's a reason you've decided to have a trio and duet for the 'trapped' gesture? How does it link to your stimulus?
ReplyDeleteThank you for this comment. We decided to create a trio and duet based around the word trapped as we wanted to change up the formation and rather than having everyone dancing together we thought it would like effective having a duet and trio to make the dance more interesting. We chose the word "trapped" as from researching into different patients stories I can imagine you must feel very stuck and trapped inside a mental asylum at times as you are locked away from the outside world, as well as this people with mental illness might feel closed inside their body and desperate to find a way out in order to receive help and overcome the troubled time they are facing.
DeleteYou have made a good start by deciding the beginning and end to your dance. Do you plan on sectioning your piece any further to make choreographing such a long piece easier.
ReplyDeleteThank you Eloisa. Yes, due to the piece being 10 minuets long we feel it will be easier to get through if we create different sections for different movements, which we can then put all together adding in transitions to make our piece flow seamlessly.
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