Advanced Independent Choreography

  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 ...

 Chosen practitioner - Mats Ek  I have chosen to use Mats Ek (see photo 1) as my practitioner because his piece ‘Smoke’ particularly intrigued me.  Previously I had not seen any of Mats Ek’s work and therefore his piece ‘smoke’ was the first work of Ek that I had experienced. The piece instantly intrigued me, grabbing my attention because of the unique choreography. The movements were sometimes bizarre and that’s what impressed me the most, after only watching a few minutes of his work. After seeing this piece I decided to research more into Mats Ek and his choreography.  Photo 1  (Leslie-Spinks, 2012) From research into Mats Ek’s creative process and how he creates movement, I have found that he in fact says himself that he works to translate ‘pure emotional reaction’ rather than a conscious intellectual choice’ (The Choreographer Mats Ek, n.d.) within his choreography. Ek’s style is particularly focused on his desire to portray storylines with ‘imaginative int...

  Research and structure of piece  The research I will carry out throughout the piece is looking into the lives of different children that were evacuated during WWII. I want to be able to find first hand resources from children that have expressed their true feelings about the situation for example in a diary etc.  Firstly, although evacuating children was voluntary “the closure of many urban schools and the organised transportation of school groups” (Clouting, 2021), heavily encouraged parents to send their kids away. They used posters to advertise the evacuation plans (see photo 1). The children were able to take a few items with them. The list of things was issued to their parents including gas mask, night clothes etc. Although only very little items “many families struggled to provide their children with all of the items listed” (Clouting, 2021). The children would gather in train stations before the trains came to take them away in large, crowded groups (see photo 2)...

New stimulus idea After considerable thought over my original stimulus idea, I have decided to change it early on in the process. Although changing my stimulus is not ideal, I would prefer to do it now rather than work on a piece that I am not completely happy with. Although I liked my idea surrounding sleep and the concept of dreaming, I feel my idea was too vague and that I would end up basing the storyline of the piece on things that have already been portrayed in the media such as in movies or T.V. Instead, I have decided to rethink my idea. I will now be doing my piece on evacuee children during Work War Two (see photo 1). See photo 2 for notes of this new stimulus idea.  Photo 1 (A policeman helps young evacuees and the nun escorting them, n.d.) This idea resonates with me because I feel there is a lot more to research regarding these matters. Personally, I am very interested in the lives of people during WW2 and I am fascinated with survivors' personal stories and strug...

  Stimulus Idea  I have now chosen my stimulus for my choreography piece. My stimulus is surrounding the idea of dreaming and the concept of dreams within dreams. The notion of dreams within dreams is something extraordinary and actually, a concept explored a lot within the creative industry. Many films have explored this idea, such as Inception (Inception (2010) - IMDb, n.d.).  One of the main ideas I want to use within my piece is to have a section of movement such as a small gestural phrase to convey the idea of “waking up”. This gesture will hopefully be able to demonstrate to the audience that the character is supposedly "waking up" from a dream. However, because the whole concept is about questioning your surroundings and not knowing what is real and what is not, this gesture may be representing a false awakening (Raypole, 2020). Along with this strategy, I will also utilise some of the piece to represent the research I will do about the science behind sleep (Hopkin...