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.