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 upon final performance

As mentioned in previous blogs, I have been injured with a badly sprained ankle and I am coming into my 4th week after the accident. Due to this unfortunately happening, I was unable to perform with my group in the choreography assessment. However, I will be performing it in the new year whether it being in January or in the Spring assessments in March. I think it will be challenging due to us having the 3 week christmas break and not having much time to rehearse when we come back for the new term. But for me, I will spend my break rewatching the video of the piece for familiarise and learn the movement so when we do come back, we won't be spending too much with me learning the movement and we can spend the time on the formations and the timings.
Post a Comment
Read more

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: first week

In our first choreography lesson, we got seperated in our household groups which is a group of 3 in my case. Each group was given a picture based on the arts as a political statement and as a group we had to write down our thoughts and feelings that came to mind while looking at each picture. The first picture me and my group analysed was of the navity being somewhat protected and shielded by a wall. This wall was covered in graffiti with words such as 'love' with a peace symbol as the o and a skull which could perhaps represent death. However, central of the wall seems to be a bullet hole but as we discussed further with this, because this hole is above the nativity, we thought it could represent the north star. After discovering that this artwork was created by the artist 'Banksy', we linked it back to the subject of the lesson which was arts as a political statement so we associated it with perhaps religious hate crime. The second picture is taken in an art gallery w...
7 comments
Read more