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].
Very detailed blog post Mhairi! I like how you have incorporated your research! What do you want the audience to take away from your piece? How would you like them to feel?
ReplyDeleteThank you Erin. The overall message we want to portray is the idea of encouraging individuality. We want to show the audience that it is okay to be yourself and show that you don't have to conform/ fit in with the standards of society.
DeleteYou’ve done lots of research and this was a very well detailed and interesting blog! How do you plan on turning this research into movement?
ReplyDeleteThank you! We plan on using unison at the start of the piece with repeated motifs but adding small changes to try and introduce the idea of individuality. For example everyone will be dancing a motif in unison however one person will do a different head movement. We will also incorporate canon to show the idea of conformity as one person will do a movement and everyone else will copy to 'conform'.
DeleteI found it really interesting to read about your thought process and what research you did to reach your finalised idea. Do you have any ideas on how you will develop any social experiments into your choreography?
ReplyDeleteThank you Caitlyn. There is a social experiment where 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 could potentially use this in our dance by standing and sitting at intervals, or doing a certain movement and have other people join in. We could also edit 'beeps' into our music to really emphasise this.
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