Skip to main content

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. Daisy StonierNovember 9, 2020 at 1:31 PM

    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?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hannah Tinsley-HopeDecember 3, 2020 at 9:58 AM

      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.

      Delete
  2. Abigail DowseNovember 14, 2020 at 4:16 AM

    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. Hannah Tinsley-HopeDecember 3, 2020 at 10:15 AM

      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. sadie medcalfNovember 23, 2020 at 3:45 AM

    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. Hannah Tinsley-HopeDecember 3, 2020 at 10:28 AM

      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.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

choreography module: evaluation

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...
6 comments
Read more

choreography module: seventh week

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...
6 comments
Read more

choreography module: second week

 In the second week, myself and my group came together to decide on our own stimulis to bring into the choreography lesson. We chose a picture of a hand which consisted of lots of linear lines and patterns. In our groups, we went around the room and observed and analysed the other groups stimulis and ideas and commented a word or two that we thought as a group represented the picture clearly. The words and ideas that were written about our stimulis was the following: * shapes *different pathways *linear and curved lines *black and white *intertwined *represents DNA and information *the idea of leaving DNA behind *hand - the idea of contact *transfer of DNA *contrast From the selection of words we were given, we chose 3 that stood out for us and created 4 movements/motifs for each word. Each movement had to be 8 counts and altogether should create 12 movements. The first word we chose was 'contrast': 1st movement - arm swipes head, grab arm up then down. 2nd movement - soft swir...
6 comments
Read more