choreography second year- sadie medcalf

In this blog I will be discussing the progression me, and my group have made over the term. I will also be showing the challenges we faced and how we overcame them. Overall, I think my group has made a lot of progress and has created a very good piece of choreography. However, along the way we have faced a few challenges. A main challenge we faced was time management. Due to having a short amount of time to create the 10-minute piece it was already a struggle to choreograph a well thought out and clean piece. However, our group often got stuck on ideas or processes which took up some of our well needed lesson time. To combat this, we decided to make a plan of what we were going to do in each lesson and how we were going to do it. For example, we set a plan to choreograph the beginning section by using the dice method. This was an effective way to keep track of time. Another challenge we faced was losing track of our stimulus. Leading on from the last challenge, due to the small amo...

  In this blog post I will be comparing two of James Wilton’s pieces. I have decided to compare The Shortest day and The Storm. I will be beginning with The Shortest day. I chose this work as our group were inspired by it when creating our choreography. We were inspired by the small pauses in the movement and the way the dancers portray a feeling of confusion. They do this by stopping and looking around as if they are lost. We were inspired by this and added our own version of this movement in our piece. In the Shortest day, Wilton seems to have really thought about the thoughts and feeling of the audience when watching the piece. Right from the beginning of the movement I was compelled due to how the dancers were really selling the small movements they performed. For example, one dancer was just looking around however the way in which he did it caught my eye and inspired me for my choreography. In the beginning the dancers perform small and slow movements whilst they are deeply ...

  In this week’s session, we began by beginning to look for images which would inspire the ending of our dance. We stumbled across an imagine, which can be seen below, which showed some individuals wearing straight jackets. We did some research and found that this was a common method used in order to restrain people in the mental asylum. We began to think about some movement we could perform with our arms behind our back. We thought it would be a good idea to repeat some phrases which we had already used earlier in the piece to show the contrast between the use of arms as it would make it more obvious to the audience what we were trying to show. We decided to change up the formations in order to use the whole space and make the piece more interesting due to the use of travel. We also added some partner work between house holds due to us believing it would show us helping one another. Us showing our need for help shows how the individuals in the mental asylum need help in order to b...

  In this week’s session, our main focus was to create an entrance to the piece. We decided it would be a good idea to add a more minimal entrance to the beginning of the piece so that the choreography does not reach its climax near the start of the piece. We referred back to our stimuli of the corridor which led us to begin standing in a line one behind the other towards the audience. We thought this would portray that we are stood in said corridor due to us being in a precise line. We also began to think deeper into what the parallel line could show. We came up with the idea of how it shows the loss of individuality and freedom, like individuals who are put into a mental asylum, due to us all repeating the same movements at the same time. We decided that we would start with small and slow movements which would eventually grow and become bigger to show distress and create a creepy mood for the audience. I referred back to Kate Flatt’s book which encouraged me to really think about...

  In this weeks lesson we decided to polish a part of choreography we created in our own time. We went over the counts, the dynamics and the spacing in order to make in clean. We also decided to brain storm more ideas on how we will enter the stage in a captivating way. We then translated these thoughts into movements. We decided that the beginning of the piece should start with Lucy creepily stood still in the middle of the space for a little while until me , Rosabella and Hannah slowly walk on stage with our eyeline always at the front. Right as we start walking into a formation Storm bursts on stage with a sprint and then we start the movement. We also decided on a beginning piece of music in our own time. We decided on using ‘prodigy’ by Nathan Laniar as it had the contrast of dynamics within it similar to the movement we created. The music is also very sinister and ominous which goes well with our stimulus. We found that the beginning of this piece of music is hard to count th...

    In this week’s lesson, we started off by recapping over the gestural phrases we created last week. We then decided to create some formations which can be used within the assessment piece. We did this by drawing crosses on a piece of paper to represent where each person was placed. We then added the motifs from last week to the new formations. We thought about different choreographic devices we could use in order to further display the idea of a mental asylum to the audience. We added some retrograde and cannon to create a more frantic ambience which we thought showed the stimulus. We then decided to go through each phrase whilst thinking about the timing and dynamic in order to stay together as a group and create contrast between the movements. For example, we added in short pauses to create suspense and made some of the more small and precise movements sharp to show light and shade within the piece. Once we had finished our task, we decided to research into some music we ...

    In week 5’s lesson we looked closely into Kate Phlatt’s book which is named Choreography: creating and developing dance for performance. The book encouraged us to look think about the beginning and end of our piece. Mainly how we want to make the audience feel as soon as we step on stage and the last thing, we want the audience to see. We discussed about creating a creepy start where one person begins on stage as the rest of the group creepily walk in making eye contact with the audience. We also discussed the use of choreographic devices which we may use within the piece. For example, we want to use retrograde and cannon within a section of our piece to create an unpredictable and frantic piece which links back to the stimulus. After this group discussion we were given the task to come up with some words which linked to the stimulus. We came up with words such as frantic and isolated. We then had to individually come up with some gestures which went with our selected word...

  Choreo week 4 In today’s lesson we had to come into class with a stimulus for our assessment piece. As a group we found a picture of this dark hallway which can be seen below.  This gave our group the idea of basing the piece of an asylum. We discussed different ideas we had which would clearly show the audience this idea. For example, we talked about having a section of mostly stillness with small twitches of the head and arms in correlation to the music. We believed this could give an eerie ambience similarly to the picture shown above. After discussing this we had to share with the class our ideas. I enjoyed sharing with the class as the other students inputted their opinions and thoughts of what we had come up with. It also gave us a chance to hear the other group’s stimuli which was interesting to listen to.  As a group we came up with some words which fit with our idea. We then split off into two smaller groups and came up with 2 small phrases inspired by the word...