Choreographic Devices

 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 simple sketch gives one a general idea of the pathways we have at the beginning of our piece, I feel there is a clear link between our formation here and our stimulus.

From exploring the different choreographic devices in our classes, we noticed that other ideas began to arise from it.. Early on in the structured improvisation, when we go in our own pathways we then came up with the idea that we could perhaps include collisions to give the effect of emotions boiling up and bouncing off each other. Moreover using the split focus choreographic device in our choreography class sparked inspiration for a few other techniques such as mirroring and canon.

In order to help us with our choreographing, in class we partook in a few different activities. For example, one lesson we were split into smaller groups of three or four, and were each given a photo from which we had to come up with a short section of choreography influenced by said photo. This was a good activity because it gave us more practice of exploring ways in which we can take inspiration from a stimulus in order to create movements. In another class we watched a TED Talk by Wayne Mcgregor (TED, 2012) which was really insightful, it was amazing to see how creative he and the dancers in the video could be when given such a simple stimulus (a letter/word, in this case TED). Watching the video was a useful experience as it introduced us to new ways of creating choreography along with teaching us that you don't have to have a really exciting stimulus in order to be able to create something really interesting.

Moreover, the music itself is another thing that instigated a few of the choreographic devices that we have incorporated in to the piece. For example, there are two points where we use canon due to it fitting perfectly in time with the tempo and dynamic of these particular sections of the music.

In our future choreography sessions we hope to be influenced even more so that the audience can really get a feel what someone with dissociative identity disorder has to deal with.

Bibliography:

TED, 2012. A Choreographer's Creative Process In Real Time | Wayne Mcgregor | TED Talks. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPPxXeoIzRY> [Accessed 25 November 2020].