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.
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.
You have explained each task really clearly and I like how you described your thought process with the intention of your choreography in the first week, when you said you started 'intertwined' and then 'separated' to represent the wall. How effective did you find each of these tasks and do you think either of them would be useful in your future choreography?
ReplyDeleteThank you Daisy. I think both tasks will be useful for future choreography because making notes based around a photo generates lots of ideas. It also enabled me to branch off from the original notes to give a wider variety of ideas, feelings and themes based from the photos. This meant that there was a lot of words to help inspire movement! I think that both tasks were effective however the second task created a longer phrase due to the randomly generated number sequence. I also think the second task created a more interesting phrase as our original movements were put into a random order and featured some repetitions.
DeleteVery good blog post Mhairi! It’s very clear and descriptive. Did you enjoy getting feedback from your classmates? Did you find it helpful? Do you want to continue performing to your classmates to get feedback?
ReplyDeleteThank you Erin. I think it's really useful performing in front of my classmates because it helps me to understand areas which I need to improve, it helps generate ideas for how I could develop the movements and identify things I could change within my choreography. I definitely enjoy hearing people's opinions and I would like to carry on receiving feedback to help me improve!
DeleteThis is a great blog Mhairi! You have described the task well! Would you use this task again? If so, is there anything you would change about it?
ReplyDeleteThank you Caitlin! I would definitely use this method when creating my group choreography as it helps generate ideas by thinking outside of the box. This will help identify key themes and words which I can use to create motifs and gestures within my dance. I also liked that we had a time limit on the task because it meant there was no time to overthink so it produced more organic words. If I was to change anything about the task I would probably make the number sequence longer to create a longer phrase.
DeleteThis is a very well written blog post Mhairi, I really liked your analysis of the stimulus you chose. Why were you drawn to the 'Scar of Bethlehem' instead of the other stimuli? what stood out compared to the others?
ReplyDeleteThank you Caitlyn. I really liked this stimulus because it had a lot of details in it which could be interpreted for ideas. It also showed a narrative which really helped us when we were choreographing the movements. What stood out compared to the other stimuli was the contrast between the idea of love shown in the nativity scene and the bullet hole in the wall suggesting war and death.
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