week eight, reusing choreographic methods

 Between last Monday's and this week's session, me and my group wanted to focus on making a great amount of progress in the length of our choreography, to leave us enough time for refinement and improvement towards the end of our rehearsals.

Over the weekend, me and Megan used the chance method in order to devise a new section of choreography. The idea behind this section was to depict the anxiety and stress we may feel as humans when trying to fit in with the pressures of society. Our movements are inspired by feelings of breathlessness, shaking and sweaty palms, which are common symptoms of anxiety. The repetition of these movements shows the fear that grows upon us in order to conform and follow the crowds, rather than break free as individuals, and us falling to the ground depicts how mentally draining this can be. Our use of gestures in this phrase, and also throughout our whole choreography, has taken inspiration from Akram Khan's 'zero degrees' - a piece exploring the concept of duality. Khan's work shows the power of taking human themes and using simple gestures to tell compelling, thoughtful and ambitious stories (Akram Khan Company, 2015). Our vision is similar in the way in which we have drawn on human insecurity and fear, to explore the idea of conformity within society, repeating movements conveying uncertainty and anxiety to do so. We also developed this section with members of the group randomly standing up a sitting down and then others copying, to reflect on the social experiment that we have researched where people in a waiting room willingly stood up and sat down each time there was a beep, without knowing why and just because there were others doing so. Here are our notes on the creation of this section and a video of it:

https://youtu.be/vQ_uVus_NG0


Furthermore, we also used the translation task, but only in pairs and with one chance to learn the phrase this time, in order to create three duets. Each of us used one of our words from the gesture task as our form of inspiration and alongside the more sombre section of our music, these duets create a sorrowful and longing atmosphere, reflecting on the tiring and isolating effects of a desperation to fit in with society. We found this to be much more challenging as we had less opportunity to remember the phrase, however I think this worked in our favour as we ended up formulating more intriguing 'adapted' versions with improvisation. Here is a video showing the original and adapted phrases and the duets that they created:

https://youtu.be/Z0sm7792iHk

We also used this week to work on any transitions that we hadn't yet decided on and put phrases such as the quartet to fit the music, which has been difficult to adapt choreography that was created to 8 counts, to music that is counted in 6. However, we have worked through this together by finding powerful accents in the music that we can exaggerate certain movements with. This video shows the quartet to music:

https://youtu.be/7FRhgnJsroQ

References:

  • Akram Khan Company. 2015. Zero Degrees - Akram Khan Company. [online] Available at: <https://www.akramkhancompany.net/productions/zero-degrees-2005/> [Accessed 14 November 2020].
  • Akram Khan Company. 2015. About Us - Akram Khan Company. [online] Available at: <https://www.akramkhancompany.net/about-us/> [Accessed 14 November 2020].
  • Akram Khan Company, 2017. Zero Degrees / Akram Khan & Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui - Trailer. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wQG9BTW5AE> [Accessed 14 November 2020].
  • Blogs.cornell.edu. 2019. Social Experiment: Information Cascade : Networks Course Blog For INFO 2040/CS 2850/Econ 2040/SOC 2090. [online] Available at: <http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2019/12/04/social-experiment-information-cascade/> [Accessed 14 November 2020].
  • 2016. Social Experiment - Most People Are Sheep. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEhSk71gUCQ> [Accessed 14 November 2020].

Comments

  1. LouisaBratbyNovember 20, 2020 at 2:06 PM

    This is a wonderfully structured and carefully thought blog, well done! I can see you have put great thought into how you create new movement material as you use choreographic methods to your advantage as well as using pieces by other choreographers as inspiration.
    Can you further describe one movement that you came up with in your duet with Megan? How did you internalise the movement inspired by the words breathlessness, shaking and sweaty palms? Where did the movement come from in the body?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Daisy StonierNovember 22, 2020 at 11:53 AM

      Thankyou Louisa. One movement that we used to symbolise breathlessness was pressing our hands to our chest. Rather than just placing our hands there, we tried to grab our chest with force and desperation, using an inhalation of breath to create the impression of being fearful and completely absorbed with anxiety. To contrast this we release our breath with impulse from our chest and collapse down with our hands on our thighs to show the exhalation and the mental and physical exhaustion as a result of the worry we experience.

      Delete
  2. Lucy ImamzadeNovember 23, 2020 at 11:27 AM

    I really enjoyed reading your blog Daisy, you've structured your blog clearly and used explained your process in great details, well done! You mentioned you used the transition task in order to create choreography for your duets, why did you pick this choreographic process over the other ones you used in the previous weeks?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Daisy StonierNovember 24, 2020 at 8:42 PM

      Thankyou Lucy! We wanted to use one of the methods that we hadn't done before and felt that this would be a quick way to develop movement, whilst also ensuring that we kept closely focused on or theme as it involves using words as inspiration.

      Delete
  3. NansonNovember 29, 2020 at 12:38 PM

    This blog contains lots of useful information updating us on your progress, this is great to see. Why did you as a group decide to use a translation task to create 3 different duets instead of any of the other methods we used in our first few weeks?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Daisy StonierNovember 29, 2020 at 2:16 PM

      Thankyou Nathan! As said above, we wanted to use one of the methods that we hadn't done before and felt that this would be a quick way to develop movement, whilst also ensuring that we kept closely focused on or theme as it involves using words as inspiration.

      Delete

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