Choreographic influences

In this blog post I will be discussing our choreographic influences that have inspired our work in different ways to enhance the quality of our work. Firstly I will be discussing the work titles Young Men by BalletBoyz which I will compare to the work Sutra by Sidi Larbi to dictate how they have influenced our piece and how this has effected the impact of our work.

Young Men by BalletBoyz is a dance film based on their stage performance at Sadler's Wells Theatre. The piece was choreographed by Ivan Perez and is about the impact of war onto thee soldiers and how they change as people because of this. This strongly correlates to our theme of the impact of war and how the negative effects make the fighting pointless. Their movements carry a lot of drama and have many lifts which are very impactful to the audience to show the characters connections to each other. Unfortunately we are unable to do this as often  as we wish as only households can touch therefore we cannot create this impact through contact so instead we are using the sticks and also eye contact to make the connections between each other, showing the characters intertwined lives. The creative process from the video below entitled 'BalletBoyz in rehearsal for Young Men' shows the choreographers focus on the feeling and intention behind the movements which we have also tried to develop into our piece which means that every movement has purpose rather then just being there for the sake of looking nice. There are sections of the film where speech is used which can be seen in the video below entitled 'Stage Production Trailer'. A man shouts go and everyone begins to run. We have incorporated this idea into our piece in the second section where we 'trick' the others by shouting and banging to catch their attention thinking were sergeants to show the playful sides of the young boys that were in the war.

Another influence to our work was Sutra by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui which is a piece that explores the Shaolin faith and philosophy, performed by a cast of monks from the Shaolin Temple. They use wooden boxes and one metal as the main props but they also use long sticks similar to ours and by using force and strong movements these sticks appear to be like weapons to the audience even though there are just wooden dowels. We have tried to express this also by using ours to represent bayonets as which were used in the first world war and a few wars previous to that. There is also a section where it looks like two of the monks are fighting over the metal stick and use it as a tool for contact work which we have done not for a sense of fighting but to show connection between each other which has a different effect however using a similar idea. There is also a section where they perform a series of movements in canon which is very dynamic and looks almost like an ocean wave which we have incorporated into our 'countdown' section to symbolise that time is moving and we are getting closer, building tension the way the monks build ambience.

Sutra by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui therefore helped inspire a lot of movement choices for us where as Young Men performed by BalletBoyz guided us in the intentions of the movements and the acting side of the piece, influencing us to step out of the box by being vocal rather then telling the story only through movement.

https://www.balletboyz.com/film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC5tEqnSmzI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWv8eghYkro&t=1298s

https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/2018/sidi-larbi-cherkaoui-antony-gormley-with-monks-from-the-shaolin-temple-sutra/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNHMrSh4XB4