Today’s workshop gave us the choice to
experiment with all the different elements of dance, using a stimulus. As
always we started with a locomotor warmup, which had a more cardiovascular
orientation, due to the more physically challenging nature of the choreography
in today’s task. We traveled around the space to music and moved into the
corners of the room, to carry out burpees, star jumps, triceptives and
crunches. This reminded me of the dynamic stretches you would start a PDHPE
lesson with.
We were then introduced to the choreography
sequence, which was more organic movement than previous sequences. It linked
with last lesson around the picture book Henry and Amy, by Stephen Michael King, asking us to characterise a movement as being akin to either Amy
(controlled, restricted movement) or Henry (free, wild movement). The sequence
used levels, canon, isolated body parts and contrast.
This followed on to the main task, which
would normally comprise a term of work with background research and cross-KLA
integration. We formed groups based on our interest in a range of stimuli
presented:
- Tactile (feeling an object in a bag). The
range of possibilities here are endless!
- Visual (a tribal statue of a woman with her
head in her hands)
- Kinaesthetic (creating a narrative to go
with the choreography sequence)
- Ideational (creating a 30 second
advertisement for a product, with criteria of vocals, slogan, a focus on a
particular body part, an element of contrast, etc….
I worked in a pair on the visual stimulus.
We had to brainstorm ideas, develop a concept, create movement to show intent.
We had to consider using space, time, dynamics, relationships and structure.
What do you see, hear or touch? How do you move? What do you feel or think?
 |
| our visual stimulus |
We brainstormed ideas based on the functional
way the object opened up, the cultural context of a naked tribal woman (the
aesthetics of material and shape) and the vulnerable emotion conveyed in her
body language.
Our piece had the intent of showing her moving from a stressed
state of vulnerability, pausing for self-reflection, seeing herself (in a
mirror image), and eventually breaking free. We used mirroring techniques,
isolating body parts by focusing attention on our fingers running along the
floor, contrast in the way we broke from mirrored actions, and changing levels
from low to high. The musical accompaniment we chose was perfectly suited (Salt, from a Bangarra Dance Theatre performance called Terrain, composed
by David Page).
The sorts of movements we used were also partly inspired by Bangarra Dance choreography, as can be seen below:
After ten minutes, we performed our pieces,
after stating our title and intent. I think the piece really connected with the
audience due to the relationship we conveyed and the slow, occasionally
contrasting movement. It was satisfying receiving feedback from peers who said
the piece really touched them!
The difficulty of this task was not having
parameters to guide our thinking. In comparison to other tasks, the visual
stimulus was more open to interpretation. I would start students with stronger
scaffolding before moving into tasks that are more open for interpretation.
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