week ten, reflecting on our starting objectives
Reflecting back on the start of this module, our aim was to create a piece which explored 'conformity within society', showing how we influence one another to make certain choices or subconsciously abide by the decisions of the majority. However, we wanted our ultimate message to be to encourage individuality and project the freedom that can be felt when exploring your identity and the beauty in having variation amongst us as humans. We set ourselves these three questions to focus on and to help us develop our ideas on this theme: 'Why are we influenced by those around us and how does that influence happen?', 'Are we fearful of individuality?', and 'How can we be free of conformity within society and why should we want to break away from it?'. I feel as though we have explored each of these questions in the different sections of our choreography, starting with the beginning of our piece where we demonstrate conformity through canon and regimented movement, moving into the 'fear' section where we develop on the anxiety felt when attempting to fit in or break out, and ending with our freeing and expansive movement. Using our research on Asch's conformity experiments as a starting point for forming our ideas, we looked further into other social experiments, leading us to include moments in our piece which allude to real life examples of conforming. For example, the waiting room experiment, where we used repetition of standing up and kneeling down to create a sense of chaos and confusion, as we unknowingly performed this 'meaningless act' just because everyone else was (video of this section: https://youtu.be/CDsTZkYjquA). Furthermore, we have used gestural phrases to keep a cohesive range of dynamics and emotions throughout such as 'influence', 'pressure' and 'restriction', which helped us to keep a secure focus on our theme and intention behind our movement as we related each phrase back to these 6 words. Although at times this meant that the impact of our choreography didn't build as it all had a similar dynamic, in the past week we have explored how our intention and execution of each movement can drastically alter its affect on the audience. The repetition of these intricate gestures has been admired by our peers in our feedback, as they said it really helped to convey our message and kept them engaged and interested when watching our piece. Another successful element of our choreography was our use of formations, which we aimed to include a wide variety of, focusing on using tight and controlled positioning in the first half, compared to scattered and unrestricted placement in the second, to reflect on us breaking free. One of the main difficulties of our piece was making our timing secure and counting our music, as we knew how important this was for ensuring that our message was conveyed, making it clear when someone was exploring their individuality, rather than just being out of time or looking confused. To overcome this, we dedicated sections of our sessions just for clarifying the order of our piece, timing and logistics to help us become familiar with the music and the cohesiveness of the movement. We also struggled with covid restrictions meaning that we couldn't do contact work with other households which made showing conformity and influencing one another difficult, however we overcame this by being productive with our time and each creating duets and quartets households, recording it and sending it to each other so we could learn it and then bring it together in our rehearsals.
This week, we wanted to further emphasise the liberation and freedom in our final section and referred back to Crystal Pite's Solo Echo to emulate the expansive qualities of her movement. From this we developed a new phrase with much more energetic and lively dynamics, demonstrating elevation and an extensive use of the space as we haven't shown previously. The video of this can be seen below:
We also added in a section to make our attempts to break free more obvious, as Abi runs forward but is grabbed by Caitlyn and Mhairi with the rest of us reaching out for her in desperation, inspired by this image from Solo Echo:
- Bäcker, M., n.d. Photos From Solo Echo. [image] Available at: <https://en.opera.se/repertoire-for-dance-tour/solo-echo/> [Accessed 25 October 2020].
Having seen your work progress over the last ten weeks I have seen how you have changed and moulded your work to suit your brief. I think your work is very effective and wish you the best of luck in your assessment. I would like to know what you have taken from this whole project, working as a group, choreographing for multiple people, organising ideas, positives and/ or negatives?
ReplyDeleteThankyou Nathan! Overall, I found this to be a challenging but rewarding project and I really enjoyed how working with multiple people brought a wide variety of ideas that I would never think of myself. Although at times it was difficult to decide which of these range of ideas we would use, it has been really beneficial for me to see how other people work and to be open to a variety of methods and suggestions. It was a struggle to find times where we were all available for rehearsals, but I think we overcame this well by choreographing some sections separately and then bringing them together in our assigned sessions. This has meant that, despite enjoying working in a group, I have also found how I work well as an individual and have grown in confidence when contributing in a group setting.
DeleteI really enjoyed ready your blog Daisy as well as watching all the hard work you and your group put into your choreography. Reflecting back to last year, have you preferred working within in a group this year in comparison to working individually last year?
ReplyDeleteThankyou Lucy. I have really enjoyed working in a group this year because it is nice to hear and incorporate everyone's ideas and to build more unique shapes and patterns with more people being on stage. The only element that I have found difficult is time organisation and being able to freely experiment with ideas, as it can be hard to find times when the whole group is free to work on something or to give an idea that you've come up with in your head a go with multiple people instead of just having a try on your own and not worrying if it doesn't look very good, which sometimes makes me prefer only being responsible for myself. I can see the positive and negatives of working on my own and in a group so it has definitely been an enjoyable and beneficial experience for me and it has been good to try something new.
DeleteI have really enjoyed observing the development of your groups piece, to see how you have successfully overcome challenges and met them with a keen and strong mentality to produce your final piece. Do you think your structure has strongly helped increase the messages you are trying to convey?
ReplyDeleteThankyou Louisa. Yes we hope that the structure of our piece will effectively show a development from the restrictive effects of conformity and leading to the expansive and freeing quality of individuality. We feel as though the structure of our piece will guide the audience through the varying emotions of conformity, such as unknowing influence, fear, inner struggle and liberation.
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