Week 4
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 interesting and feel may inspire ours. Cadence (1990) (2:39 - 3:35)
The use of sound in the breath and also with hitting the hip and chest is something we would really like to incorporate in a marching section that we feel could begin the piece.
Task of the Lesson
We separated our group of six into twos and made three different motifs for the piece. We created a motif based on fear, one based on patriotism and coming together, and one based on a strong robotic march. We then learned each others which we filmed and are linked below.
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| FEAR |
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| MARCH |
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| TOGETHER |
Structure
Finally we narrowed down our ideas and create a structure for our piece, we will eventually add music to these and create time stamps for each section so that we can develop our movement further. The letters in brackets next to each of the seven sections represents the idea of how long each will be, (s) for short, (m) for medium and (l) for long.
I really like your stimulus idea and it's interesting to see how you have taken the subject of war, which is quite a broad starting point, and researched to find specific wars and props to show the intention of the piece. I also like the idea of using breath and hitting the chest, I think that will be very effective. How will the spacing of your motifs link back to the stimulus? How will you use choreographic devices to support the idea of war?
ReplyDeleteThank you for your response. We have considered many pattern we will use, for example if we were to depict and army we would form in straight lines to demonstrate the discipline of soldiers and would dance in unison. In other sections where we want to build drama we will consider more random/open spacing with devices such as repetition, accumulation or canon.
DeleteThis is a really interesting stimulus! You have clearly put in a lot of research into this and I look forward to seeing how you present these ideas in your piece.
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned that you want it to be thought provoking and captivating, is there any specific message or thought that you want the audience to take away after watching it?
Thank you for your comment. We as a group have decided the message to be that war only brings loss and sadness and that it is wrong to expect ordinary people to fight just so decisions can be made.
DeleteThis is a very well detailed blog! I like how you narrowed down such a large stimulus of war into 7 different sections! It is interesting to see how you interpreted your stimulus. What do you want to make the audience feel by ending with the minute silence?
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment. We are hoping to leave the audience with the narrative that war can never be positive even if you win as it leads to the death, injury and/or traumatisation of regular people. The minute silence section gives the audience a moment for this to sink in.
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