Choreographing - Translation and Chance Tasks
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 they would then attempt to do it. From the 2 original phrases, we then had modified versions that we developed and combined to form about 40 seconds for each pair- meaning that we had overall choreographed over 1 minute for this “duet section”. I feel that this method was extremely effective as we came up with a lot of choreography in a short amount of time.
https://youtu.be/6-eV51QKdwE here is my original phrase 1, the modified phrase 1, Mhairi’s original phrase 2, the modified phrase 2 and then the developed phrase.
In the second part of the lesson, we learned a new floor section that included some of our developed gestures from week 5. The new gestures were inspired by a piece called ‘zero degrees’ by Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi as their movements are frantic but synchronised we also thought this conveyed fear and anxiety as these are emotions are evoked from the feeling of peer pressure and the need to fit in. We first came up with the 3 gestures and then used the chance method from week 2 as this was a great way to develop the gestures into a sequence. Moreover, we then incorporated the idea of a social experiment based on conformity we found: https://youtu.be/o8BkzvP19v4
This experiment starts off with one test subject and everyone else in the waiting room is part of the experiment. Every time a beep sound is heard, everyone stands up and so the test subject sees everyone else and conforms to this behaviour. Eventually, each person gets called in to see the doctor and only the test subject is left, even with everyone else gone the test subject keeps standing up when they hear the beep sound. More test subjects are gradually introduced into the waiting room and they conform to this behaviour too.
During this chance section, there are 4 notes in the music that we used as our ‘beeps’ and it starts with one person who stands up during this. Again, like the experiment, everyone joins in even when the original person stops. This section is a very crucial part of our choreography as I feel it portrays our stimulus very well.
At the end of this session, we ended up with a rough 7/8 minutes of choreography which I am very happy with as we were able to achieve this quickly. I’m looking forward to using more of the exercises we have learnt previously to inspire choreography as they were very effective to use this week.
Well done - you seem to have had a very productive week! I particularly like the reference to one of the social experiments from your research. What do you intend for your audience to take from this?
ReplyDeleteThanks! We really want to show our stimulus but we thought it would be even more effective to have a social experiment as inspiration. We'd like for the audience to see how easily people follow each other, how easily we conform to irrational behaviour just because everyone else is doing the same thing.
DeleteI really like how you decided to choreograph in your household groups to utilise time at home but you’ve made it fit well with the idea of conformity! How do you plan on finishing your choreography? What is the final message to the audience?
ReplyDeleteThanks! We want to integrate lots of motifs from our first piece, however we will develop them to show how we have started to break away from the idea of conformity. Our final message is just encouragement to not shy away from individuality when being faced with conformity.
DeleteThis is a great blog post Caitlyn! Very detailed and it shows how you have overcome many challenges such as having to work in household groups. Which method of creating choreography do you believe has been most successful?
ReplyDeleteThanks! I would say the translation tasks have been the most successful method as we were able to do it within five minutes and we created two minutes of choreography in this time.
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