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Pina Bausch - Café Müller

Café Müller is another piece by Pina Bausch that sparked some inspiration for the choreography. Similar to when I critically reviewed another piece of Bausch's, The Rite of Spring, upon first watching I was unsure of what the meaning or stimulus behind it was, I could see that the piece appeared to be set in some kind of café, in which there was a woman who seems to be potentially mentally ill due to all of her jerking and repetitious movements, this relates back to our own choreography as the aim of ours was to raise awareness of all the mental health illnesses out there that so many deal with on a daily basis. A little later on in the piece, a few other people enter the stage going about their life but also with frequent moments of peculiarity too. Café Müller features lots of repetition and jolty movements which perhaps could be interpreted as a way of exemplifying mental illnesses.  In terms of the music, it's very regular for the most part, this is reflected through the mo...
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Evaluation

 To conclude my blog posts on the procedure behind the creation of our choreography piece, I’m going to give a brief evaluation.  Overall I feel that the stimulus and message of the piece did come through clearly in our choreography however with regards to the message, maybe not quite to the extent I think it potentially could have, however due to this being our first proper attempt at choreographing a piece I think it was a really good effort from us all. There are moments where I think the stimulus is really clear, Taylor and Portia's section at the beginning of the piece in particular. This is because we really bring to life the brain with all of the emojis stemming out from it through us each leaving the clump formation one by one, each embodying our designated emotion. At this point I feel we represented the stimulus very effectively, another moment that I think this is in Gabby's section when we are, yet again, in a clump arrangement creating movements that resemble the ...
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Pina Bausch - Rite of Spring

 The practitioner I have taken inspiration from to help me with our choreography piece is Pina Bausch, an extract from her work: "Rite of Spring" in particular. Bausch took people's emotions as her starting point, looking at the various fears, wishes, needs and desires that people experience. As a result of this process she has produced multiple pieces of work that embody that of a dream-like feel, using poetry and the body to create choreography that audiences can relate to due to her blatant take on reality.  (Servos, 2020) Link to extract I'm reviewing : https://youtu.be/0VqaGkKQRCU When trying to think about what the stimulus might be for this piece after watching the extract a few times I struggled as nothing came into my head straight away however after analysing things a little more I came to the conclusion that it may have something to do with natural emotions due to all of the brown dirt that covers the stage, and also the dancers movements ...
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Problems and Solutions Within the Choreographic Process

So far in our choreographic process we have encountered a few different problems and come up with ways to resolve these issues.  For example, in the bad memory section in around the middle of the piece when we transfer from a diagonal line going across the stage to lines of 3, 4 and 2, we discovered that some collisions were occurring between Olivia and Taylor. To solve this problem, we made a slight change to the formation, Olivia and Taylor swapped positions with each other which allowed movements to flow more seamlessly creating a more visually pleasing performance for the audience.  Moreover, spacing was another problem that arose. Near the beginning of our piece, in the nostalgic section when we incorporate the choreographic device of split focus, it was brought to our attention that some people, myself included, were having some trouble with transitioning from their position here to their next one due to them having to travel too much of a distance in a moderately short ...
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The Processes Behind My Section of Choreography

 When choreographing our designated section, we went through various processes to come up with ideas. The section I'm choreographing with Gabby and Portia consists of a significant change in the dynamics of the music and symbolises a fight between different personalities. To mark this change we decided to start off with a big, explosive jump to represent the emotion of anger. We also include punching actions and flexed feet at various stages to put emphasis on the fact that we're portraying a fight. Moreover at another point where there is a slight change in the music, we established that I would do a few quick pirouettes whilst everyone else made a formation around me reacting to my quick movement in slower manner to create a contrast. By having a split focus here the stress the DID sufferer undergoes is highlighted through my quick turns which give off the effect of whirlwind and in turn a sense of overwhelm. After this moment of stress, we all stand tall in unison in an stro...
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Choreographic Devices

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 At the beginning of our choreography, when our aim is to imitate the brain (the main focus of our stimulus), we start off in an organised formation, creating circular movements in unison. We then go on to use the canon technique, dropping sequentially followed by us looking out to the audience in unison, once again. The next choreographic device we decided to use were pathways followed by structured improvisation, our reason behind this was to embody the strings coming away from the brain, we each go our own way creating our own movements to portray our individual designated emotion. After we have done this we create a split focus, with four people going to the centre doing a separate combination of movements all in unison whilst the rest of us form a semi-circle continuing with our improvisation but this time bringing our movements closer to the group to not only bring the audience's focus to the group in the middle but also add different levels to our piece.  This very simp...
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Choreography Structure

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For our choreography we have chosen the song Bloodstream by Tokio Myers  (Myers, 2017).   After listening to it a few times, as a class we sectioned it into 12 parts to mark either a change of tempo or the style of the music. We also briefly outlined what would happen at each of these points.                            (Here's a photo of the sections we divided the song into from our class)  Our current structure for the piece consists of us all standing in a cluster, moving together as one for around the first 20 seconds, from there we split off one by one, moving in a way that reflects our designated emotion. Our thought process behind starting in a group together was wanting to mimic the brain from our stimulus, and us breaking off individually, with our varying emotions, symbolises the emojis stringing out from the brain. After this, at roughly the 50 second mark, we will transfer to a more nostalgi...
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