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choreography module: fourth week

 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 care and treatment of patients on the 1st October 1931 and it became the worlds largest mental institution. 

In the 1950's was when the hospital began to do lobotomies and electro-convulsive therapy to their patients.

Labotomies - "a form of psychosurgery that involves severing connections in the brain's prefrontal vortex".

Electro-convulsive therapy - "formally known as electroshock therapy, a treatment in which seizures in the brain are electrically induced in patients to provide relief from mental disorders".

A quote that I found that could possibly turn into a motif was from the Pilgrim State website stating "the mental health stigma continued to isolate patients from the rest of society". The section about isolating patients I thought could be interesting to look into when it comes to creating choreography.

Later in the lesson, in our household groups within our bigger chosen choreography group, we were given the task to create two short phrases using the few techniques we looked into and took part in in the past couple of weeks. Our group decided to focus on the word "erratic" so we looked into sharp and intricate movements such as just as little as twitching with our hands.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyqisGyx4Zg&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rlhidee2sI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckmMbn2vvYQ


Above our the 2 phrases that my household group created as well as Storm and Lucy's phrase.

Resources: 

https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/facilities/pgpc/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy


Comments

  1. Well done Hannah, you have done a great depth of research which I think will be a useful form of inspiration for your choreography. You explained that you brainstormed a variety of ideas from the picture you found, what elements of this picture led you to discussing mental asylums?

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    Replies
    1. Thankyou Daisy. I think by looking at the picture, we straight away caught attention to the creepy and eery atmosphere of the corridor. This led us wanting our group choreography to have that kind of feeling and atmosphere too and after lots of ideas of what we could do and what the corridor looked like, a mental asylum suited the stimulus and we used this going forth.

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  2. This blog is presented really well with the use of imagery. I love the fact you have included a quote and found this, are you planning on including movement linking to the quote?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thankyou for your comment Abi. As soon as I found this quote whilst we were doing our individual research on the stimulus, the way that it mentions "isolate patients", I thought it could definetly be a starting point of movement in the aspect of isolating.

      Delete
  3. Well done. This blog is interesting. I like your research on the old mental hospital. How are you planning to show the ideas you have researched into your choreography?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As a group, we decided that after our further research into the 'Pilgrim State Hospital', we would look into different stories from different patients that were admitted there. We then chose to portray different element of their character to show in the movement to give a clearer link to our stimulus. One of the patients would hear voices in her head so we chose to use that as a section of the choreography and add voices into the music.

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