Choreography 2nd Year: Hannah Tinsley-Hope

As we come to the final week before the assessment, this blog will be mainly focusing on the overview on how I found the process of creating our choreography. Our choreography was solely based on the idea of being patients in a mental asylum and the patients different characteristics in particular. One of the main intensions is that we want the audience to feel the emotions we will be portraying when we perform the piece for example; one of the ending sections called 'Straitjackets', the feelings behind the movement is quiet emotional which we will show by how we perform the dynamics in the dance, facial expressions and eye contact with the audience. At the beginning of the process, we fully concentrated on our stimulus which was the picture of the hallway which is shown below. We did end up to focus on other ideas based on the mental asylum and getting slightly off track but in the 3rd or 4th choreography session, we decided to mainly concentrate on the picture and made that o...

In this blog, I will be discussing and comparing two choreographers and their pieces and how they relate to our own choreography.  The first choreographer and piece I will focus on first is James Wilton and his work 'The Shortest Day' which is based around the psychological effects on people when they know their time is limited. By watching a small preview of the dance, straight away you can feel the sense of eeriness where the male dancer is stood by himself slowly looking around himself and not making any fast or jolted movements. This can be seen as a clear link to our choreography as we use the same kind of atmosphere in certain sections to create the creepy kind of vibe to the audience. Later on in the piece there is a sudden change in the music and the dynamics of the movement which could portray the sense of panic and chaos linking back to what the piece is based on. The movement seems to be grounded and powerful with moments of floor work and jumps which again links cle...

This week was officially the week to show everyone our offical 10 minute piece. Due to changes of the timetable and being able to work on our choreography during contemporary lessons as well, we were able to create the finishing product by the end of last week.  However, before we showed our choreography on Wednesday's contemporary lesson, in our session on Monday we focused on one of the final sections which involves the idea of being in straight jackets. By portraying this idea, we will execute the movements with our arms behind our backs.  We thought about repeating certain movements from previous sections of the piece to show the contrast of being free to be restrained.  We also decided to change formations due to the use of space we need as we travel a lot in this particular section. Due to me still being injured, I sat and observed the choreography when it was performed to the class and saw it from an outside perspective which I thought was quite beneficial when it ...

Unfortunately, during this week in ballet class, I tripped and twisted my ankle quiet severly and as a result, I was unable to dance this week. However, my group and I created and added more material for the opening section focusing on entering and arriving into the asylum. We decided to look back on our previous choreography lessons where we learnt all the techniques to formulate movements and by this, we chose the chance method, where as mentioned in earlier blogs, is where you number all the movements and roll a dice which determines what sequence the movements will fall into.  We made sure that we kept referring back to our stimulus and we actually thought that the opening of the choreography should actually be based in this corridor. From this, we chose to start this section standing in a straight vertical line portraying the idea of being in the hallway. They perform a series of strong and powerful sways and walks forward to also show this idea. They also perform the movement...

In the first week back, we ended up having the whole group back together again so we were able feel more confident in building on more choreography. This week in particular we decided on focusing on the whole beginning section of the choreography which will show the audience us, as the patients, entering the mental asylum.  The movement in this section, we wanted to have fluid elements to represent us being weak but once we 'arrive' at the asylum, we wanted to include sharper and more intricate movements to show the more robotic side to portray the idea of being controlled.  An example of this is shown when the group of all 5 of us are placed in a triangle with Storm placed at the front, following by Sadie and Bella on either side of her, then myself and Lucy following them. We then executed a series of intricate movments in the choreographic device of canon as we thought as a group that this device would be most effective and suit this section of the choreography well. We als...

In the week before we broke up for half term, a group of five turned into a group of three but we didn't let that affect our choreographic process.  We were told to start to create choreography up to 3 minutes so as trio, we decided to create this by developing the gesture phrases we made last week. We made the choice to have the atmosphere of this phrase to be mainly based of the idea of being in the asylum. We made sure to do this and show this to the audience by performing the movements very sharp and strong and to have a lot of movement in unison due to us being "controlled" and using the choreographic device of unison would portray the idea of our stimulus clearly.  As we went on, we created a section and we were most proud of was when we were in a triangle formation facing stage right and we were sitting on our knees. We sway back and forth to portray us as the patients are starting to go a little bit crazy and again, using unison as the main choreographic device in...

In this week, our choreography were set another task to help us create phrases which was the use of gestures. Each of us individually had to come up with a gesture lasting around a couple of seconds and each gesture representing our stimulus of the mental asylum.  https://youtu.be/YZJrakwv66c Above in this clip is all of our individual gestures from following our main stimulus. After those are shown, you will see a series of phrases that we have created from each of our gestures. We included the use of levels, we thought about the dynamics of each movement and the intention about.  My gesture in particular, I focused on the word "controlled" as I thought it fitted clearly with being restrained in the asylum. The first and orginal gesture starts with wrapping my arms one at a time, one arm on my shoulder, one arm on my waist showing the way I could be "restrained" and "controlled". After the arm movement, I simply roll my head round in a circle implying yet...

 In this week, we were given our offical choreography groups for the upcoming assessment. My group is myself, Sadie, Bella, Lucy and Storm. In the class, we discussed and came up with ideas of what are main stimulus would be. We actually came up with our idea in this class rather than going home and doing further research, one of us mentioned the idea of doing something creepy and different and thats how we found our stimulis (shown below). Based off this picture, we brainstormed individually ideas that come to mind when looking at this picture and once we came together we decided on creating our choreography on a mental asylum. From this, we did our own individual research and we focused on the 'Pilgrim Psychiatric Centre' for our first area to get inspiration from. The Pilgrim State Hospital was created by the Legislature in 1929. The hospital was named for the commisioner of mental health of the earl 1900's, Dr Charles W Pilgrim. The hospital opened officially for the ca...