choreography year2

week 10    When we decided on our stimulus, our end goal was to create a piece that was thought-provoking and brought attention to the social influence of conformity- through this we want the audience to recognise the importance of their own individuality.    I feel as though we have met our starting objectives by exploring our stimulus and conducting extensive research. As we chose a theme with such strong scientific links, we had a large variety of subtopics to explore and this meant we didn’t have much difficulty generating ideas that were relevant to conformity. An example of this is how we drew inspiration from a social experiment- we were able to develop this concept into a creative portrayal of how easily people conform to society when under pressure.  We also drew inspiration from two practitioners and implemented aspects of their work into ours- examples of this would be how they evoke emotions from the audience and the use of gestural movements....

Crystal Pite’s “Solo Echo” is described as “ a journey from adolescence to maturity” (Mackrell, 2018)- this sort of ‘character development’ is an aspect that we included in our piece as it ties in well with our stimulus. We want to show the journey from conforming to society to our end goal of being able to show individuality in the face of peer pressure.  Even the simplest of Pite’s gestures that are “functional” for support or balance (Mackrell, 2018) can evoke the strongest of emotions from the audience. Again, we too want to be able to create these strong emotions for our audience- our six gestures (based on our six words) from the beginning are quite simple,    however, every time we have used them in our piece we were able to develop them into really interesting movements. The fact that we were able to incorporate these gestures into our piece multiple times, and that they are based on words we generated from our stimulus, further emphasises our theme and ideas. Thi...

week 9   This week we were able to complete the last few sections of our piece and we have a finished draft. In the second song of our piece, we really wanted to convey the idea of us breaking away from conformity and starting to showcase our individuality. For some of our sections, we used motifs and gestures from the first half of the piece and we developed them to have a more flowing and free dynamic. Using these movements from previous sections and showing their development made for effective choreography that tied in well with our stimulus. We also introduced a new section called the “waltz” section as we count in 3’s while travelling in a weaving motion in a circle. Referring to one of Crystal Pite’s works that we have drawn inspiration from before, we watched “Solo Echo” again. In this piece, we really liked the look of the extensive arm lines and use of the upper body so we tried to incorporate this aspect into our waltz section. In the ending section, we break away fr...

week 8    In this session, we really tried to focus on coming up with more content as our deadline is approaching soon. Over the weekend we had choreographed a lot in our houses- as we are in household groups this encouraged us to utilise numerical variation as not all of our group members live together. This separation within our group mirrors the initiation of breaking up the conformity and unison we were previously in.    As we were all together in the lesson we tried to slot together the separate sections we had, learn the new parts and choreograph the transitions in between them. To then generate more choreography we used our translation task from week 2. We modified the task slightly by doing it in pairs as we thought it would be quicker and more efficient- using our 6 words that inspired our gestures from week 5 (nonchalance, pressure, influence etc.), each one of us came up with 2 counts of 8 that we would show our partner once. After they had watched it once...

  week 7    Over the half term break we communicated regularly to decide on what music we want to use. We firstly brainstormed ideas about what feeling we want to evoke from the audience, went away and all found different pieces. Eventually we found two that we want to use, initially we were worried about them not flowing and having an awkward, abrupt change in music however we came to realise that this actually worked really well with our idea of having an episodic structure- moreover, the two pieces complement each other quite well and fit the vibe we want to create.    -         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4ea81ip90U       Olafur Arnalds, Everything must change -         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEB_3cxzKv8         Ezio Bosso, Clouds, the mind on (re)wind     In today’s session we started off by discussing the stru...

Week 6   This week we unfortunately didn’t have Megan or Daisy with us in class so this encouraged us to be creative and find ways to insert them into the sections later on. In today’s session, we were able to choreograph our “duet” section, it starts off with us in duets using fast and intricate movements that were inspired by Crystal Pite’s  ‘Solo Echo’  (timestamp 0:15- 0:18). We have also learned to use this style of choreography before in our contemporary classes where we would do contact improv and have to react to the other person's movements. I really like this idea because it’s interesting to see how someone else’s movements can physically impact our own and how our bodies naturally react to this. Our movements in this section involve pushing each other away, catching each other and almost this idea of fighting. This reflects the psychological conflict one might face when wanting to escape peer pressure or conformity, therefore strongly conveying our stimulus....

week 5   In the first part of this week’s session, we began to discuss the structure of our piece and where we want each section. We decided that we wanted our piece to have an episodic structure with an overarching theme of conformity- this would then allow us to choreograph different sections separately and then piece them together later on. Rather than a fixed plan, we have more of a loose structure that we can move around if we need to as we feel this is the most effective way of planning our piece.    On page 158 of ‘choreography: creating and developing dance for performance’ Kate Flatt mentioned that it’s really important to consider what kind of atmosphere you want to create for your audience. With this in mind, we really focused on our entrance; we want this to be intriguing and powerful because it’s the first thing the audience will see and it has to have a lasting impression. We also want to repeat this section at the end to exit the stage but instead of copyin...