Second Year Choreography

  Motif Development To begin our piece we started from the beginning as we had the clearest idea of what we wanted there. We developed the marching motif from week four and created about a minute of work. We are planning on finding a 120 bpm metronome sound for this section as in most marches this is the speed used. Here is a recording of what we created. Our next steps are to clean what we have made and decide if we need more material for this section. Music We then looked at some pieces of music for other sections of the dance. We listened to pieces by Hans Zimmer, John Williams and anything from a soundtrack to war/action films. We have chosen a track from War Horse for the PTSD section which we will all create a few bars of movement for each over half term to develop when we return.

  Creating Ideas To begin we looked at our sections for the dance and decided what we wanted to create atmospherically for the audience in the opening section and ending of the piece. We decided that the beginning needed to show a robotic feeling of strength to symbolise a mass of trained soldiers. The ending will be very opposing to this as it will demonstrate how war ends in destruction and death and that no matter the reason for war, there will never be a positive outcome. We have also considered the idea of leaving the ending to a cliff-hanger where we drop to one knee with a look of fear to portray that something more is to come. Gestures The first part of this task was for each member of the group to create a gesture individually based on any sections of the dance. I did mine based on the coming together section and mimed the use of a sling shot to demonstrate play fighting of the boys before they left for war. We chose three gestures to develop further, Louisa's shows a play...

  Our Idea To begin we had a few ideas of what we could base our piece on and brainstormed until we came onto the idea of war. This spoke to all of us and we decided that it would provide us with many different creative paths to fill the ten minutes of the piece with something thought provoking and captivating to watch. Mind Mapping For our first meeting as a group we created a small mind map to come up with some ideas that we could base our dance on. This is the mind map we created. Stimuli We also found something that we found inspiring each that could become useful for the following rehearsals, we had found notable people from different wars that had interesting stories which we might include, ideas for props such as wooden dowels or boots and videos of work that may inspire movement. For example this video from the film 'Cadence' (1990) directed by Charlie Sheen, shows a group of men marching and singing the 'Chain Gang' song. We found their movements really interes...

  How to Create using Translation To begin we lined up in small groups and faced away from the person at the front. This person was given a prompt word as a stimulus, for example 'line', 'gentle', 'slow', mine was 'falling' and we had to create an eight count phrase with this stimulus. The following person then had two chances to watch and learn and then they had to then teach it and it passes down the line until the final person who may only see it once before performing what they had taken  from the phrase. Our Groups Experience We had three people in our group so the first person repeated the exercise to come up with four phrases of eight counts each. We found that they almost all changed quite a lot and you could see how our personal styles had effected the outcome of the phrase depending on the order we were in. We found unusually that our third phrase did not change at all and we'd managed to perfectly regenerate it which was interesting. Devel...

  Stimulus For this task we were required to bring in a stimulus to work with. Our group decided on this faux vine plant as we found it invoked a lot of ideas. We then went around to each of the five stimuli that each group had picked and individually wrote words that came to mind when looking at them. We then discussed the words we picked all together to provide more ideas for the next part of the task which was to pick 3 words that inspired us from any of the stimuli for a random set of prompt words. We chose ‘Trust’, ‘Individuality’ and ‘Routed’. Creating movement The next part of the task was to develop 4 movements per word which we wrote down in order of how we made them. They were separate movements that had no link between them as to prepare us for the final stage of the task. Dice Development A twelve-sided dice was thrown 15 times to create a sequence of 15 numbers, some were repeated as this was done completely at chance, hence ‘the chance method’. We then pla...

Annotation The task began with 5 stimuli all based around the theme of ‘the arts as a tool of political protest’. In small groups we annotated each picture with our thought’s ideas and questions, adding and expanding on the notes written prior to ours to establish sheets full of useful words to help inspire. We then chose a stimulus and picked 3 of the annotations to develop a phrase of movement. Our Stimulus Stolen by Adrian Brandon We chose the image created by Adrian Brandon of Breonna Taylor titled "Stolen" as all were captivating but this one had such a creative method behind it.  Brandon  used the amount of years Taylor lived as minutes he could work with to create the painting. Taylor’s life was taken at the age of 26 therefore Brandon only had 26 minutes to create this. We thought the ideas of ‘cut short’, ‘unfinished’ and ‘taken’ were interesting and really described the message the artist was producing. Challenges and What Went Well We found a lot of inspira...