Daisy Stonier Second Year Choreography

 This week I was unable to attend the lesson, however my group have kept me up to date with what they did and any developments they made. In this session, they watched an extract from Crystal Pite's 'Solo Echo' (timestamp 0.15-0.18), which is described by Göteborgs-Posten as being an "expansive, masterful dance" about love, loss and acceptance.  (Solo Echo | The Göteborg Opera, n.d.)  Pite develops her movement from the wintry, reflective language in Mark Strand's poem 'Lines for Winter' and uses both conflict and connection between the dancers, to show how their desperation, yearning and hardship in life ends with contentment, rather than resentment.  (Wessels, 2019) (Bäcker, n.d.) (Slobodian, 2018) Our group was particularly drawn to the section where the dancers are reaching out to touch each other in somewhat frantic repetition, almost willing for unison and connection with each other, but never quite achieving it. The images shown above from this ...

 This week, we started by thinking about how we may structure our piece. Kate Platt's book, 'Choreography: Creating and Developing Dance for Performance', encouraged us to consider the importance of the atmosphere we immediately create in the opening, and the last thing that the audience will see or question in the ending  (Flatt, 2019) . After developing mine and Caitlyn's motif last week, we have all decided that this will be a powerful entrance to our piece, creating both mystery and intrigue due to the unusual use of canon, and uncertainty of the copying of movement from one another. We have also decided to repeat this same motif at the end of our piece to allude to the conformity previously help upon us, but with each person breaking off into their own movement, to show how we have have dared to embrace our individuality and freedom. Other ideas that we have for moments in our choreography have been noted, however we haven't decided an order, as we would like t...

Since being put into our final groups and using the past week to develop our stimulus idea, we used the first portion of the lesson to share our ideas with the class and give a clear vision of what we hope to do. We then split into twos within our group and were assigned the task of coming up with a motif which could be repeated and expanded on within our piece. Our group decided it would be most effective to use words to inspire us and so Megan and Abi used 'connected', Mhairi and Devanshi used 'uncertain' and me and Caitlyn used 'influence'. Inspired by the idea of being drawn in by what others are doing and feeling compelled to copy them to fit in, me and Caitlyn wanted to create a motif with movements such as checking over our shoulder and leaning sideways to show the pull of following the lead of others. Using words as inspiration was a really effective way of developing movement, however we struggled to think of ways to connect these movements together wit...

 Now in our final groups for this module, we needed to begin looking for a stimulus idea which would be the source of inspiration for our choreography. To start generating some ideas, I found a variety of pieces of art that were thought-provoking and intriguing, and as a group we began brainstorming any emotions they evoked, or messages we thought they were portraying. Out of all the images I found, we were most drawn to an illustration by Lena Macka, of five dancing figures all connected by a loop of string that they're holding above their heads.  illustration by Lena Macka From this, we first started thinking about the fact that there will be multiple people in our piece and therefore it would be useful for us to consider what group or social settings we could portray. Furthermore, we observed the fact that coming up with quite an abstract theme would provide us with lots of potential for choreography, as well as a scientific theme, which would bring us pre-existing research...

 We started this week by getting into a single file line in our groups, with the person at the front of the line facing forwards and the rest facing away from them. The first person would receive a word such as 'heavy' or 'itchy' which would be the focus of inspiration for 8 counts of movement. Once the first person had created their count of 8, the second person to turn around and were given two chances to watch the short phrase and try to remember it. They would have to relay the phrase that they remembered to the third person, but would only be given one chance, and this process would repeat until you reached the final person in the line. The first and final person would then complete the phrase next to each other and we observed any changes that were made as the phrase was passed along the line. Once everyone had had a go being at the front of the line, we were left with four phrases, each with an 'original' and 'adapted' version. We then had to stru...

 This week each group brought in their own stimulus and we completed the same task as we had previously of spending a few minutes focusing on words or short phrases that the images and objects evoked. Afterwards, we went around the class, selecting our most intriguing words for each stimuli, until we had a long list of inspiring imagery for each. The image that my group brought in: photo by Rokas Aleliunas The notes that we made on each stimuli: From this list, we chose three words that we thought would be interesting to connect and contrast and in my group these were: 'sinister', 'protective' and 'blindness'.  We then created four movements for each of these which would encapsulate the quality and meaning of each word and numbered these from 1 to 12. Using a 12-sided die, we were given a randomly generated sequence of 15 numbers to form the order of our movements, meaning that we had some repetitions. With this, we had to develop transitions to seamlessly blend...

 In our first week, we began by exploring five different stimuli each connected by the idea of using art as a political tool. We were given 2-3 minutes at each image to write down thoughts and emotions they evoked, movement ideas and any messages that we thought they might have been portraying. During this process, we could raise questions for the next group to answer which led to a variety of unique and inspiring interpretations to be made. To consolidate the whole class's contributions, we had a group discussion where we explained some of our notes in further detail and also discovered the true intention of each image.  Our class's annotated stimuli: In groups, we then chose one of the stimuli to look at further, and for this I was looking at an image of the Chilean protest in 2019, where thousands of women came together to fight for the rights of females who have fallen victim to sexual violence, rape and abuse.  The song 'A Rapist in Your Path' has become wh...