Advanced Independent Choreography

  Personal Review and selection  I am now nearly finished choreographing my piece. I have three main sections correlating with the three bits of music I have chosen to use. As I explained in my previous blog, the first section contains the journey to the new home, the second section containing the monotonous everyday tasks the children had to put up with and the third section containing the reflection about the experience; some of which are positives and also the negatives of being mistreated etc. One of the main things I wanted to add to my piece was a repetitive phrase that showed my characters feelings and also personality. One of the things Miss Evans and I spoke about in the 1 to 1s was to add a motif that occurs throughout the piece in all three sections that perhaps develops throughout. In the first section I use a foot step where my feet invert and then turn out travelling across the room. I decided to use this in both my other sections but with differing dynamics. In ...

  Personal Development  Currently I am nearly finished choreographing my 10 minute solo. I have about 1 minute left. I have three main sections now that compliment the three different choices of music I am using. The first section contains the evacuee child saying goodbye to their parents and them getting onto the train along with them getting picked by the mothers. Moving on to the second section, this is supposed to represent the monotonous daily life of the child; being put to work and getting mistreated everyday. The music picks up the pace during this section which is a direct contrast to the beginning music section. I believe this contrast in the dynamics of the music helps add increased interest in the piece as up until now there hasn’t been an extremely strong beat in the music. This ”strong beat” is perhaps showing the laborious work the children sometimes would be used for when they got evacuated along with being mistreated and having to live with many anxieties and ...

 Practitioner Study 2  The next piece of work I will be evaluating is The Apartment by Mats Ek. This piece is a duet between a man and a woman. The piece's movement style has the similar quirkiness of the first piece I analysed, ‘smoke’. The woman and the man often do very simple movements yet they are quite strange, peculiar and often not “dance” like. For example, there is a moment when the woman hops around the man on the ground (see video 1). This movement is quite animal-like and almost shows a sign of perhaps “neediness” and reverting back to a “clingy” animal-like state within the relationship. However, I think this technique of using “normal” and ordinary movement really benefits the piece because it helps create the sense of normal living and daily life. Additionally, it almost looks like a very dependant relationship as they are using each other a lot throughout the piece (See video 2). They alternate between leaning and moving towards and away from each other and al...

   A reflection of my choreographic process so far Currently I am around 1/4 of the way there in my choroegraphic process. So far I have composed only a portion of the entire piece. However, the reason I have taken it more slowly, is because I wanted to ensure every movement I created had meaning and had a thought-out purpose. Additionally, I wanted to guarantee that the movement I created was also accurately influenced by my chosen choreographer Mats Ek. I feel I have achieved the majority of learning objective 1 by interpreting the choreographer, Mats Ek, work. However, I feel that once I have done the next practitioner study I will be able to increase a developed understating of more of his works and therefore use more of his style and allow it to really help my piece grow. I want to continue to use his kind of weird and “strange” movements within my piece to represent a child like persona and to continue to portray the Child Character to the audience. For example the ...

Practitioner Study - Mats Ek  Recently I have been researching into the works of Mats Ek and I have found a strong liking towards his choreography and the movement he choses to use. One of the pieces I found particularly interesting was ‘smoke’ (Smoke by MATS EK, 2009). At the start of the piece I feel the woman is confused and distressed within herself. She touches her face repeatedly and repeats movements a lot which could perhaps suggest overthinking or worrying about certain events (See Video 1). This is also heightened by the fact she is alone and therefore alone with her thoughts. As Bethel Kinswales writes, the women seems,’lonely-seeming, slightly neurotic and paranoid women, perhaps stuck in her house’. (Kinswales, 2015) Video 1 (Smoke by MATS EK, 2009) I feel the style of movement Mats Ek has used within the piece could help influence some of my own work because I feel this type of ‘panicky’ gestural movement would complement my stimulus. The children of the War must...

  Motif development/ creative task  By this point in my choreographic journey, I have started to experiment with some movement for my piece. I have taken inspiration from the movement style Mats Ek used within his piece ‘smoke’(Smoke by MATS EK, 2009). Mats Ek has used gestural movement on the dancers where he gets them to touch their face towards the beginning of the piece which I speak more in depth about in blog post 5. I have taken inspiration from this and put some of this kind of gestural movement within my choreography (see video 1). During this movement I wanted to convey as sense of confusion and almost distress but mostly trying to force ‘myself’ (the child evacuee) to feel ok and calm about the whole situation. Video 1  This whole phrase was, in fact, playing with the idea of the conflicting thoughts within my mind and the stretch and pull of my body demonstrating this. This is based on the fact that many children of war may have been facing things they really ...