Eleanor’s BTUK Assessment Blog

 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 ...

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 ...

 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...

 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...

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...

 Before reaching our final stimulus, we were presented with multiple choices from which we had to choose our favourite and then stand behind it.  Our chosen stimulus comprises of a picture of a human brain with emojis displaying an array of emotions strung out from it, to me it conveyed a sense of overwhelm, that the brain can only take so much before emotions have to be released. Some of the other ideas that were discussed included the concept that technology is used to express feelings, that everyone is the same but unique, a representation of the human brain being overworked and how social media can try to fit everyone into the same "social norm". The message we will be trying to portray through our choreography will be centred on mental health and a some of the aspects surrounding the topic. We, as a group, chose mental health as our key idea. The process we went through to come to this conclusion consisted of us looking at the stimulus, collecting our thoughts together a...