Blog post 8 - Personal Development
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 thoughts within their heads all day with no support from their actual parents. I also used repetitive movement and repeated the same section three times to show the monotony of the work they endure as well as the repetitive day to day life of living with their foster families. See video 1 to see the section I repeat in the second section of the piece. Finally, the third and final section is demonstrating only a few years on the thoughts the child is having towards her experience of being evacuated and trying to show her reflecting on the situation. The section is demonstrating internal thoughts and feelings about past times. Therefore, in this section (as discussed further in blog 9) I decided to use elongated movements and movements perhaps pushing the "air" around me towards my face which could be representing pushing myself to face my feelings about my experience of being evacuated. I arch my back whilst doing this movement and let my head fall back to show that I have still not overcome the bad experiences and the emotions still take over me.
One of the challenges I faced is ensuring that that I portray the character throughout the whole piece. I found it difficult to demonstrate the story line with the movement. I found I diverted away from portraying the story line in order to focus on the choreography and the specific movements. I found because I wanted to focus so heavily on creating different and unique movements I neglected portraying the actual story line. These challenges impacted my work by affecting how the audience views my piece. I feel the less I portrayed the storyline, the harder it was for the audience to understand the plot and themes within my piece. When Miss Evans gave me feedback, she discussed with me that that focussing on portraying the story line was a crucial element of improving my piece. I really struggled to use movement in order to portray the evacuee character in addition to the storyline of the journey of the child. I brought up these concerns with Miss Evans in the 1 to 1s where we discussed my piece and how far I had progressed. She suggested really going back and re-looking through my research and developing on it in order to re-gain my understanding for what I wanted to show with my piece. She also suggested looking at a specific section for example, the train section and think about different elements encompassed within this idea (See photo 1).
One of the main ways I used my research to influence my piece was by using story told by an evacuee (see photo) (O'Shaughnessy, n.d.). I used her story and her feelings towards the situation to create the basic plot of my piece. I then also used other research to demonstrate the parts such as getting on the train or getting ‘picked’ my the mothers. My research has evolved throughout the process along with structure and music of my piece. I decided to put more emphasis on the reflective part of the piece at the end of the 10 minute piece. Rather than the original only a minute or so I had originally planned for the reflective ending, I decided to increase this to around 3 minutes. The reason I chose to do this was so that I could take more time to use movements that are more interpretative to display the thoughts and feelings the character has looking back at their experiences.
Photo (Sheelagh O'Shaughnessy, n.d.)
Bibliography
O'SHAUGHNESSY, S.
Sheela's story - an unhappy evacuee
(O'Shaughnessy, n.d.)
O'Shaughnessy, S., n.d. Sheela's Story - An Unhappy Evacuee. [online] Timewitnesses.org. Available at: <http://timewitnesses.org/evacuees/%7Esheelagh.html > [Accessed 31st January 2020].
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