Choreography For Group Performance (MU50374O)

A few different pieces have had an impact on the choreography we have created, a show that particularly stuck in my mind is Colossus by Stephanie Lake Company, I saw a small clip of this at the beginning of the process and instantly felt inspired I loved the use of gestures and abstract movements, and the formations instantly had my attention gripped. Something I noticed was very similar in our piece is at the beginning we used a soloist surrounded by ensemble dancers and throughout this show that is a consistent theme when it comes to the numbers on stage. ( Collosus 2021)  I absolutely love the way Stephanie uses movement throughout the piece and the choreographic style is something I would love to try on myself in the future. Furthermore, I really admire the use of sounds, for example screaming and physical slapping of the body/floor. Again interestingly this is something we have tried to implement however I feel that when it comes to performing it we don't put enough emphasis ...

  Our choreography begins with 4 of us dancing an ensemble piece with Emma as a soloist, this metaphorically representing a sexual assault event. This section also fits the word isolation from the list of different effects of sexual assault. There's one significant moment where we travel towards Emma in the front right corner from the stage left back corner, and the idea is she's trapped in that corner whilst we travel towards her to attack. This corner will also then have significant moments running through the whole piece. We then let this transition into Emma's solo which is portraying how vulnerable someone may feel after experiencing something like that, and it's an expression of the shame and upset you could go through, we then join Emma, and the idea of this is we are now all representing our own stories of, pain and trauma. Moving on into the trio section, this represents minimising and is supposed to emphasise has some may shut down what they have been throug...

The first motif we developed was the awareness ribbon, so we have found a few different ways to use our arms, or bodies in order to create the pathway of an awareness ribbon, this quite obviously links to the stimulus as we are raising awareness for sexual abuse and its effects. We will demonstrate this motif multiple times throughout the piece, at first with canon and scale in play.  Some ideas we have had would mean we each do it at different times with 4 of us completing the movement much smaller and at a higher speed and then Emma as a soloist would be executing it much larger and slower then also using retrograde to reverse her movement instantly. With the added use of embellishment throughout to develop the simple movements of the arms into pathways in the body and even formations. There is an example of this in the video linked below. Video Link -  Awareness Ribbon                              ...

We analysed our piece and its theme so far and chose 3 words we felt related to the stimulus and could help us create movement ideas. These were Punch, Vulnerability, and Melting. We then created 4 movements that linked together for each word, so we had 3 small phrases of movement that could also combine together to make one slightly longer phrase. After we had created these phrases and numbered them we used a 12-sided dice to begin experimenting with the chance method. This meant that each movement would be in a different order, which could have made it easier or more difficult to combine together. This then gave us the opportunity to put steps together that we may never have thought of originally, allowing for some very unique and more abstract movements, some of which felt surprisingly more fluid and others a lot less so we may have had to add a small linking step. This wasn't necessarily an easy task as it can be quite challenging to find an interesting way to merge the steps...

In this weeks lesson we began to look at stimulus ideas for our piece with the goal in mind of deciding by the end of the session.  Prior to the class we had each individually found a stimulus of our own and gathered some research in order to help us pitch our choreographic ideas to our fellow group members.  I chose to use the stimulus surrounding a metaphorical bubble around a person. I think its so significant as each person will have their own "imaginary" personal space bubble that surrounds them as a boundary to prevent uncomfortable scenarios with other people.   (Yourtherapysource, 2019) Everyone's metaphorical bubble will be different and those bubbles will "change in size" as each person grows and experiences fluctuating mental health, or has negative/positive encounters. And throughout life you let a range of different people in and out of this bubble, some may stay for a long time, others could simply be there to teach you a short life lesson, but I...

Today we explored the choreographic process called lost in translation. There were 5 people in our group and we all stood in a vertical line fairly spread out with one person facing forwards and everyone else facing the back. The 1st person would have a few moments to create 1 count of 8 of movement relating to a word our teacher had given us before the lesson and then, the person behind would watch the 1st person do the phrase once through and then would have to repeat that movement with the 3rd person turning to watch only the 2nd person and then down the line until the last person tries to complete movement however the idea is you only see it once, so by the final person the movement has most likely been changed as in theory you wouldn't be able to accurately remember after seeing it only once, hence "lost in translation". So we were each given a word to think about when choreographing our small phrase, mine being falling, therefore it was important I incorporated move...

  In our first lesson, we looked at 5 different images in depth, and analysed all of them as a class, each bringing our own unique ideas forwards to open our minds as to what each stimulus could be suggesting through the form of art.  Of course, every image could have had multiple different meanings and were easily interpreted in a range of alternative ways, but for each image, there would most likely be a common theme we all agreed on.  For example, in my group, we were given the 5th stimulus, displayed below, and we mutually believed that it presented feelings of animalistic behaviour, either by choice or because the person on the floor was being displayed perhaps in a museum, just like an animal would be in captive in a zoo.  As a matter of fact, the photo was actually about protesting cultural institutions for taking money from companies that have connections to unethical/immoral behaviours.  We then worked in small groups to create a small movement phrase ...