The intention of our piece was to highlight how people are perceived in a mental asylum and the different characteristic that they have. To the audience, my group wanted to illustrate the idea that we are confined and restricted with everything we do. We are generally characterized as 'metal' and any sense of individualism has been eradicated. This is portrayed in the triangle formation when the music tempo rises and we do vigorous movements in unison. Furthermore, within our objective, we wanted to demonstrate the hierarchy in a mental asylum and show that there is always someone who is more powerful that can dictate what we do. As the choreography develops, the audience will become acquainted with our characters journey and therefore will feel sympathetic towards them. This can be manifested when the music becomes more gentle and we all have a moment on stage where we show our personalities. This reveals that we do have an identity and we are humans that have emotions. During the choreographic process, our primary objective was to keep our stimulus of the abandoned corridor in mind and not make movements that were influenced by our music. We found this challenging as we had a circulation of ideas that we accumulated within the weeks that we wanted to put together, but now looking back, those movements would have not related to our stimulus. In addition to this, one of our dancers got injured so, therefore, we had to rethink and adjust spacing and timing issues. Despite these challenges, my group have worked tremendously as we were open-minded about everyone's opinions. Furthermore. there was equal participation which meant a growth in productivity.
Before today's lesson, we received some feedback from our teacher to help amplify some areas of our choreography. Some of the feedback we received was: make duets look cleaner and take a risk, in our memory loss section exaggerate the movement and don't look exhausted, keep our performance all the way through and use our breath. The positive pieces of feedback were: there is a clear motif developed throughout, repeating a certain hand gesture is very eyecatching and we are all embodying the patient's mindset.
At the beginning of the lesson, we decided to include the feedback that we received in our piece as we knew that this would take time and precision. To help make our duets cleaner, we decided to make a few changes to the contact work to make it look more daring. Instead of Storm falling on me, we decided if I took her weight in my feet so she was balancing, and then I push her up to catch her again and lay her on my knee, it would be more climatic for the audience to watch. We found that it helped dramatically as our duet didn't look fragmented and problematic, https://youtu.be/1QNmSaAW2_0. In our memory loss section, we meticulously went over the dynamics to make it looked more controlled, however, we started thinking about how we could make it more appealing and idiosyncratic. We decided to use retrograde as it gave the feel of us 'losing our minds'. Along with this, we added in the use of breath and by watching the video, it makes us look more secure in our lower body so therefore we can concentrate on facial expressions, https://youtu.be/E1LvvIpKeXg.
This is a really good evaluation and you clearly go through your personal experience of creating your final piece. Are you pleased with everything that has happened whilst creating your choreography or would you do anything differently?
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comments Hannah. I am really pleased with the process that my choreography has gone through and I cant wait to show the final result to the audience. My group has worked exceptionally well to piece movement together in order for our stimulus to be captivating the whole way through. If we had to do anything differently, I would have liked to do more contact work, but due to the COVID guidelines it wasn't possible. Despite this, we still did some contact work in our households with inspiration from Jasmin Vardimon and I believe this encapsulates our message of how we depend on each other for prosperity.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really good evaluation blog, Well Done Lucy.
ReplyDeleteI'm really glad you were able to overcome these challenges faced. How did you find choreographing as a whole within a group, did you face challenges working as a 5?
Thank you for your comments Abigail. I did find some aspects of working in a 5 challenging as we had to think about different formations that would look effective, such as the triangle formation. We did over come this very quickly as we were mature about the situation and if there was a formation that would captivate the audience, but it would only work in a 4, one person would do a solo and then join in the choreography after. Despite this, choreographing as a group was a fantastic opportunity to gain inspiration from your peers and see how their individuality effected the movement. Everyone had unique ideas that were put forward within our choreography and there was an equal amount of participation which meant a growth in productivity.
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