Final Performance and Evaluation

 Now we have completed our 10-minute group dance, I’m going to reflect on the choreographic process from the past 10 weeks.

 

We intended for our dance to emphasise the idea of individuality in society by using conformity as our stimulus. We wanted the audience to feel like it is ok to be yourself and overcome the pressures of today’s society. I personally feel this has been achieved and from the feedback we have received previously, our intention is clear to the audience! 

 

After our performance last week, we received a lot of valuable feedback which will help us achieve these objectives even more. The main areas we are going to improve on are transitions, timing, spacing and making the dynamics sharper and more powerful to add impact. We have already started to work on this by changing transitions between sections as many of them were just walking which ruined the flow of the piece and wasn’t very interesting. We have now incorporated transitions using canon and our developed gestures to ensure all movement has a purpose and links to the stimulus. We have also decided to make repeated motifs bigger and more expansive to show motif development and by doing this it shows the idea of freedom compared to the movements being very structured and precise. We also adapted the duet section, so they flow better together. The duets now start how the duet before it ends, this means that each duet is linked. We also decided to stay on stage rather than walking off as there wasn’t any meaning behind us walking off. Now we perform a sequence of our gestures, one person will influence the change in gesture, and everyone follows to show conformity. This week we also decided to add more unison before we break off into our solos at the end. We added in jumps, sharper dynamics and quick changes in direction to add a highlight and build a climax in this point in the dance. The music starts to build up in speed, so this movement really compliments the music and adds drama before we all separate for our solos! As it is our final unison section it emphasises the idea of breaking free to be individual. We saw an image from Crystal Pite's 'Solo Echo' (shown below) which we used as inspiration to show the idea of breaking free.

Final Performance Evaluation

We have now performed our group dance for our assessment, I'm really happy with how it went, we adapted the spacing for the larger space and really came together as a group to pull it off! I was particularly happy with how we all performed with our faces, it really accentuated the emotions was wanted to convey and the idea of freedom at the end! 

Overall, we have worked really well as a group and always manage to overcome any issues quickly and are openminded to everyone opinions. I’m also really happy with the final piece as I think it conveys all the themes we intended it to! One difficulty we had while choreographing was finding the time to rehearse, we overcame this by being productive when we had free time at home, choreographing as part of our household which helped us create a quartet and a duet. We also used our breaks and any free studio time to rehearse all together. On occasions it was difficult to stay on task and create material that was relevant to the stimulus. Due to this, we referred back to the techniques we learnt in earlier weeks and ensured that we had used our motifs and gestures to ensure our movement always linked back to the stimulus to help get our intention across to the audience.

Practitioner Evaluation

 Throughout the choreographic process, my group have drawn inspiration from different practitioners, using their works to create movement of a similar style, how they’ve used their dancers, the processes they use, how they work and the impact they have on their audience.

 

‘Solo Echo’ is a piece created by Crystal Pite. It was inspired by “Lines for Winter” which is a poem by Mark Strand, the dance is meant to “express something essential about acceptance and loss” (Solo Echo | The Göteborg Opera, n.d.). Pite also takes a lot of inspiration from world crises and music. Her works are very socially aware and have a purpose behind them. In an interview she did with the Royal Opera House she mentioned that she starts with the music first and then creates movement to the music. This is different to how we created our group dance as initially we started creating movement based around our stimulus and added music after. However, we have taken inspiration from the social issue of conformity within society, albeit, not as serious as some issues Pite references to such as the refugee crisis in ‘Flight Pattern’. Within ‘Solo Echo’, Pite uses a range of choreographic devices such as canon, unison and repetition. We also use these choreographic devices in our piece as they’re effective at showing motif development. Our piece also features group work, duets and solos which is also shown in ‘Solo Echo’. Pite’s work has a lot of contact between the dancers and the uses the idea of one person influencing another person’s movement. We used this idea in one of our duet sections where we’ve used contact with our partner to influence the other’s ‘reaction’. The movements are really expansive and inspired us to use a floor work section to add levels into our dance.  

 

The other piece we looked at was ‘Zero Degrees’ by Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. The short excerpt I watched featured a duet with two men, they perform a sequence of hand gestures in unison while using spoken word. This really inspired us within our dance, using the idea of hand gestures to emphasise the emotion and stimulus in our dance. There is a section where we repeat three hand gestures which show the idea of sweaty palms, anxiety and a pacing heart. This is contrasting to ‘Solo Echo’ as in the video I watched, there wasn’t any clear gestural movements, it was made up of large, expansive movements. Later on in ‘Zero Degrees’ the men are on their feet repeating a sequence of movements multiple times and also perform two separate motifs which are complementary to each other while using different spacing on the stage. Similarly, repetition was used in ‘Solo Echo’ during one of the duets and also in my group piece. We use it throughout our group while developing the motifs to show the idea of individuality. Unison is used in all three pieces which is effective at showing themes within a dance which is demonstrated in our choreography by showing the idea of conformity. Similarly to Pite’s work, ‘Zero Degrees’ has a narrative. It is based on a journey which Akram Khan had from Bangladesh to India where he had been sharing the train carriage with a dead man(Mackrell, 2005). The most prominent themes in the piece are love, lonliness, life and death, very similar to the themes of love, acceptance and loss in ‘Solo Echo’. The impact the works have on the audience are quite different. I personally feel that ‘Zero Degrees’ is very hard-hitting, tense and emotional. This is achieved really well by the use of spoken word and gestural movements which makes it seem like the two men have lived through the same traumas. In contrast, I feel that ‘Solo Echo’ is open to interpretation regarding the narrative. The themes of loss are clear from the movements in the duets as it seems like they are ‘fighting’ for acceptance. In my choreography, the impact on the audience is to show the idea of individuality and breaking free from the pressures of society, initially this may leave some questions, however they are answered by the end of the piece, as they are in ‘Zero Degrees’. 

 

References

Mackrell, J., 2005. Zero Degrees, Sadler's Wells, London. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/jul/13/dance> [Accessed 21 November 2020].

 

Göteborgs Operan. n.d. Solo Echo | The Göteborg Opera. [online] Available at: <https://en.opera.se/repertoire-for-dance-tour/solo-echo/> [Accessed 21 November 2020].

 

The Royal Opera House, 2017. Crystal Pite Rehearses Her New Piece With The Royal Ballet. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipnL4TeIbzs> [Accessed 21 November 2020].

Week 9 - Choreography Performance

 We have now completed our 10-minute group choreography piece based on our stimulus of conformity. We made a lot of decisions for the group this week, using feedback we had received in previous weeks and from issues we noticed while watching our videos back. We have made a few changes, for example, developing sequences which have been repeated to make them more expansive and dynamic to add a contrast to the original undeveloped motif, we also adapted some formations to increase interest and variety. Additionally, we rearranged some sections and removed movements which didn’t work, to ensure the piece flows well and clearly shows our intention of conformity vs. individuality.

We used an improvisation-based task to generate some movements for the solos which are featured at the end of the dance to show the idea of individuality. However, we use movements from our initial entrance motif just to link the piece back to the stimulus. We have adapted a section so it now references a social experiment which a woman walks into a waiting room full of 'patients' who are actors. They all stand at the sound of the beep. After three beeps she joined in even though she didn't know why they were doing it. As more people entered the waiting room, they joined in too until there were no actors left. This shows the idea of conformity as the people stood up on the beep even though they had no idea why they were doing it, but everyone else was, so they did too! We demonstrate this idea by kneeling on the floor then standing again, with people gradually joining in until we are all doing it.

 

This week we also performed the final group peice in front of our classmates and teacher to receive feedback. We were told that the formations were pleasing to the eye and that using accumulation, unison and embellishment was effective in developing the idea of conformity and individuality. They liked that we didn’t always have every group member dancing all the time, for example our use of duets, quartets and solos. One improvement we need to work on is extending mine and Caitlyn’s duet at the end of the dance, to satisfy the audience as we walk away from each other. Furthermore, we still need to ensure clarity in our timing and spacing. Overall, we've used a lot of different choreographic processes such as the translation task and the chance method which is clearly shown throughout the dance. Motif development is also clearly demonstrated within our piece and the use of inspiration from choreographers such as Crystal Pite and Wayne McGregor. At times it has been quite difficult to arrange our choreography however by using these techniques it really helped us generate relevant material for our stimulus and I feel that we've worked really well as a group. 

Week 8 Choreography

 This week we managed to complete five minutes of our choreography. We have created a few new sections which we used some of the choreographic methods we learnt in the first three weeks. One section was created using the chance method using 3 words; fear, passive follower and anxiety/panic. From this we created 3 motifs and put them into a randomised order to create a sequence. The idea behind this section was to depict the anxiety and pressure people may feel to try and fit into society. The movements are inspired by the feeling of shaking hands sweaty palms. Another section was created using the translation task from week 3 but in pairs rather than the whole group. We used the same words from our gestures (influence, pressure, nonchalance, uncertainty, restraint, judgement) and created a phrase based on a word with a 5-minute limit. We showed our motif to our partner once, who then copied the motif as best as they could however there were some changes due to the nature of the task. I then learnt my partners motif to have 2 original and 2 translated motifs. Each pair then developed these motifs into a duet. This has been really effective for our group by using our previous choreographic knowledge and incorporating movements which link back to our stimulus and ensure it is clear to the audience. I think using this task worked really well for our choreography as the translated motifs show the idea of individuality as that are different from the original motif. As the motifs are performed as duets, it shows that individuality within society is allowed.

 

We have finalised our music choices and started to edit them. We are using “Everything Must Change’ by Olafur Arnalds for the beginning of our dance as it starts out with a regimented beat which really works with our stimulus as we are trying to 'conform’. As the song goes on there slower parts and highlights which we have been able to accentuate to show the idea of individuality. The second piece of music is “Clouds, The mind on the (re)wind” by Ezio Bosso. This piece is freeing and light which shows a contrast to the first piece of music and further helps show our intention as the second half of our dance is showing individuality and freedom compared to the rigidity and unison in the first piece.

Week 7 choreography

This week we worked on the beginning of our dance, specifically the entrance. We enter the space by doing the ‘influence’ motif from week 5. We have developed this motif by adding accumulation, so each person joins with the motif as they enter into the space. We travel horizontally across the room in a straight line from stage left to stage right. We also added canon into the motif and the section after. We do a sequence of turns to face different directions which is influenced by one person and ripples down the line. We've used accumulation and canon in this first section because it's very effective at helping us demonstrate our stimulus of conformity. Using these choreographic devices at the start of the dance clearly shows the idea of fitting in with the standards of today’s society as each person joins in by copying the motif, following the person at the front of the line.

 

We also created a new section of the dance which will follow on from the entrance. We walk from upstage left to downstage right in a clump formation and one person at a time will do a movement different from what the rest of the group is doing. This looks really effective and also shows the idea of conformity and individuality. Our classmates told us that the intention of the piece is very clear to the audience however we need to ensure that the spacing is even when we are walking. Next week we will work on a transition between the two sections and clean up the spacing to make it more uniform.

Week 6 Choreography

 In this week’s lesson we began to link the movements we have created and use that to initiate more content for our group piece. It was slightly more challenging than previous tasks as we only had 4 members of our group rather than 6. Despite this, we decided to use it as an opportunity to create a section of our dance with contact material as members of my household are allowed to touch whereas the two missing members of the group aren’t able to touch us. This supports the idea of conformity as there is four of us dancing together and two which are away from the group which suggests individuality.

We inspiration from Crystal Pite’s ‘Solo Echo’ (Video inserted below, timestamp 0:15-0:18). The section we looked at has the dancers stood in a group reaching and touching each other. We liked the idea of this as it links to a task which we have done previously during contact improvisation in our contemporary lesson. It involved us rapidly reacting to someone else’s impact, using simple movements to create an interesting set of motifs . This first half of the movement is performed in two pairs facing away from each other and then moves into a unison section where we repeat a motif three times, the first time we all do the same however the second and third time, someone breaks away from the mould and does a movement slightly differently such as an arm or head. This further implies to idea of conformity as we are performing the same motif in unison and even when someone breaks away to do something different, they still return to the original motif.

 

We performed this section of our dance to our classmates and teacher to gain some verbal feedback to help us improve our dance. We were told that the movements clearly showed the intentions and stimulus but that we need to be more precise when someone isn’t conforming so it is clearly intentional that someone is doing a different movement rather than being wrong or late. This is something we will be able to work on in upcoming lessons and while we make our group cleaner.

References

GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, 2018. Solo Echo, By Crystal Pite.
[video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JfokSokH0M&feature=youtu.be> [Accessed 25 October 2020].

Week 5 Choreography

We began this lesson by explaining our stimuli and initial choreography ideas to the rest of the class and heard the other group’s ideas too. We separated into three pairs and each pair had to create a motif based around a word or theme from our stimulus. Devanshi and I chose to use the word ‘uncertainty’ to inspire the movement for our motif. We decided to use change of direction to show the idea of confusion or uncertainty as it makes us seem unsure of where we are going. The other pairs used the words ‘influence’ and ‘connection’.

The motif inspired by the word ‘connection’ was performed facing another person and was a series of arm movements without touching. The motif inspired by ‘influence’ was a travelling sequence performed in canon to suggest the idea of one person doing a movement and other people copying, similar to question and answer. Videos of each original motif are shown below.

 

We taught and learnt each motif and started to think of ways to develop them to be part of a group piece. We started by developing the ‘influence’ motif (shown below), by using canon and accumulation. We decided to make this our entrance to the stage as it is a good way to create intrigue and show confusion as the first impression from the audience. 

 

We began to think and discuss the structure of our group piece. Our teacher read page 158 from ‘Choreography: creating and developing dance for performance’ written by Kate Flatt which says when we start choreographing work, its important to consider the world the audience is about to enter (Flatt, 2019).  This led us to think about the themes we want to show in our piece, the first thing the audience will feel and sense, how the piece will start and how many dancers will be on stage and what we want the lasting impression of the piece to be. 

 

As previously mentioned, we will begin the piece by walking on using our ‘influence’ motif which we hope will cause intrigue and confusion from the audience. We discussed idea of repeating the same motif at the end of the piece but a developed version to show individuality to reflect our stimulus. By doing this we will have shown the idea of conformity and pressure to fit into society at the start of the piece and the juxtaposition of individuality at the end of the dance.

 

We also created 6 gestures inspired by words related to themes of our stimulus which we developed into more complex motifs. These gestures will be used and repeated throughout sections of our dance to help make the intentions and themes obvious to the audience as they will be able to recognise the movements during the dance. I’ve included videos of each gesture and their developments below.

I think both tasks have been really successful for our choreography as it has created material which we can develop and repeat throughout our dance to make the intention and stimulus very clear to the audience.

 

References

Flatt, K., 2019. Choreography : Creating And Developing Dance For Performance. 1st ed. The Crowood Press, p.158.

Choreography Stimulus

 The stimulus for our group piece is the idea of conformity. The initial starting point was the picture above which is by the artist Lena Macka. We liked how there was 5 individuals who appear to be dancing under the sun/moon and are all connected by a piece of string. It is an abstract piece which means it leaves a lot of room for interpretation, making it easier to generate movement from. 

Following on from the starting point, we had the idea of social experiments from the social area of psychology. A particular study which sparked our interest was an experiment by Solomon Asch in 1951. His experiment aimed to investigate the desire to conform to social pressures and how that affects our own perceptions (Kinney, 2015). He used 50 male students from Swarthmore College, USA. In his experiment the test subjects were asked to perform in a ‘vision test'. They had to choose a line which matched the length of another line out of 3 options, when tested individually less than 1% answered incorrectly. However, the participants were tested in a group setting with actors who worked for Asch and were told to answer incorrectly, 75% of the participants answered incorrectly even though the correct answer was obvious. Asch concluded this happened for two reasons; the participants wanted to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence) (Mcleod, 2018).

 

Furthermore, we felt that conformity is very prevalent in today’s society as there is many social pressures and influences which affect how people behave in social settings. For example, the clothes people wear and wanting to fit in to be fashionable, drinking at parties so they don’t feel left out or social media trends. In addition to this, we thought of other social situations where people portray conformity and we discussed the London underground. The underground shows clear conformed behaviour due to queues, lines and avoiding eye contact.

 

From these ideas we were able to create our final idea which is ‘conformity within society’. Why are we influenced by those around us? Are we scared of individuality? We thought this could be a good idea for our piece because the stimulus allows for lots of movement ideas such as having a group of people dancing in unison, showing conformity and one person doing a solo with contrasting movements to show individuality. We can show this by using different choreographic devices to show the idea of conformity such as accumulation and canon.

 

References

Kinney, W., 2015. Asch Experiments. [online] Wiley Online Library. Available at: <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosa068.pub2> [Accessed 11 October 2020].

 

Mcleod, S., 2018. Asch Conformity Experiment | Simply Psychology. [online] Simplypsychology.org. Available at: <https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html> [Accessed 11 October 2020].

Week 3 Choreography

 This weeks we tried a new choreography technique called 'translation' which is similar to the children’s game ‘Chinese Whispers’.

We were separated into groups and stood in a vertical line, the person at the front of the line was given a word and had to create 8 counts of movement inspired by the word. The other 3 people in the group were facing away so they couldn’t see the motif. Once the motif had been created the first person had to teach it to the second person, who taught it to the third person etc. This meant that by the time the fourth person had been taught the movement, the original motif had slight differences such as arm lines, eyeline and timing, due to slight changes made when copying. We ended up with 4 original motifs and 4 translated motifs. The words my group had were line, four, falling and gather. Our task was to join these 8 motifs to make a group piece. We used the choreographic devices accumulation, canon, levels and changed the dynamics. We started in a square shape doing my translated motif. Caitlyn, Abi and Devanshi then repeated the translated motif while I did the original motif at the same time. We decided to do this as it looked interesting and as if I was trying to break free. We also used other formations such and lines and incorporated different levels.

 

The video below shows the completed sequence which we created.

Initially, this task was challenging due to the time limit and trying to be creative when creating the motif. However, I made my motif with simple movements and it still had an interesting translated motif. I will definitely use this task in the future as there were lots of possibilities for the motifs and how they could be joined and developed to produce an intricate, exciting sequence.

Week 1 and 2 Choreography

We began the first choreography lesson by looking at different techniques to help us for when we start our group choreography piece. Our first task was to analyse a visual stimulus and create 4 counts of 8 of movement. We looked into examples of art being used as a political tool, this included photos and artwork of political protests. We started by going around to each picture in small groups and had 3 minutes to write down all our thoughts and feelings about each piece. The task became harder as it went on because we had to try and think of ideas which hadn’t already been written or try to expand on someone else’s interpretation. We then discussed all the notes that had been made on each piece and then decided which picture we wanted to use as a stimulus. 

My group decided to use ‘Scar of Bethlehem’ by Banksy (pictured below) which depicts a wall that represents the wall between Israel and Palestine. The main idea we wanted to show within the piece was the contrasts between love and death and how it was portrayed by the nativity scene in the photo which represents love and unity but was juxtaposed by the bullet hole in the wall. We started intertwined with each other to try to show the theme of the nativity scene and as the piece went on we gradually became separated as if the wall had been built between us. We performed our piece to the rest of our class to gain feedback and find out if the intention of the piece was clear.

('Scar of Bethlehem' by Banksy https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/22/banksy-nativity-with-bullet-hole-in-place-of-star-unveiled-in-bethlehem )

 

In our second week each group brought in their own stimulus, we brought in another photo by Banksy called ‘No Future’ which had been painted in Southampton, England in 2010. Each group then made notes based on each stimulus and at the end we picked 3 words from any of the stimuli. As a group we chose the words intertwined, abstract and continuous. We had to create 4 movements for each of the 3 words to have 12 movements by the end of the task. Our teacher used a 12-sided dice to randomly generate a sequence in which we had to order our 12 movements. We had a sequence with 15 movements due to repetitions created by the dice We had to choose a number 1-4 and each number corresponded to a piece of music my group ended up dancing to the Lone Wolf Trait remix of ‘Night’ by Ludovico Einaudi. We added transitions, changed the timing and dynamics within the piece to make it more cohesive and emphasise dynamic beats in the music and make movements slower to contrast the quicker tempo.

('No Future' by Banksy, BBC 2010)

 

I think both of these tasks will be useful in the future when choreographing for my group piece as it creates material which is specific to a stimulus. This will ensure that the intentions of the group piece will be very clear to the audience while creating interesting sequences of movement. The tasks may be time consuming so to reduce this we could each use a word to create a motif rather than doing it as a group.