At the beginning of our choreographic process we set out to create a piece that was inspired by our stimulus 'Flower Thrower' by Banksy, that represented the two sides of peace and violence intertwining with each other throughout the piece, both trying to win. Looking at our final piece I believe we have achieved what we set out to do. We have our moments of big clashes and the moments of soft contrasting each other telling our story through our movement. We set out to create something that was able to be interpreted differently in our own personal dancing of it but remaining with the central essence of peace and violence.  Choreographing in a group for the first time brought a couple of challenges and learning experiences. I learnt that some people prefer choreographing and some prefer to just dance. I found that I like to choreograph but it can be hard if other people are not on the same page, in the future I would hold more group discussions to really get a glimpse of everyo...

 We have nearly finished our choreographic process and are now putting the finishing touches onto our piece. We have pieced together our sections and are now blending them all together to fit as one piece. I would like to mesh the different portions and messages together to create a more seamless looking piece that flows well. We agreed that if there was some steps of the piece we didn't gel with we would rework it to fit how we wanted to depict it to give a more authentic feel. While researching Christopher Bruce the dancers seemed to be all in with their movement, it was like they believed they were in the message of the piece and I wanted to emulate that. Our research has evolved during our choreographic process. We began by simply picking a choreographer we hadn't quite heard of and now I feel I could talk in length about Christopher Bruce and his pieces. We began to start thinking while creating, asking questions like 'how is this telling the story of our piece?' a...

 The piece I have chosen to research this week of Christopher Bruce's is Ghost Dances running approximately 30 minutes and first performed by Ballet Rambert on July 3rd 1981. Ghost Dances gets its story from the Chilean military coup in 1973 and the torture and murder of a popular singer, song writer, and poet, Victor Jara. Bruce met with Joan Jara, his widow who told him her story and gave him a copy of an unfinished song that was about her life with Victor. Bruce described Ghost Dances as a statement human rights but mostly how normal people get caught up in political oppression and fighting. (Foyer, M. 2015) Bruce wanted to depict this specific event but not limit the meaning to only Chile thus using folk dance (Rambert, no date) which is far from the other piece I have studied 'Rooster'. Ghost Dances is certainly different to Rooster in many ways. Rooster to me felt very carefree and light-hearted whereas Ghost Dances had a very solemn  message about it. I think with Gh...

We are about halfway through our choreographic process movement wise. I would like to get a good deal finished this week so we can focus on the execution of the technique and the storyline we're portraying. I think it is important we have time to really clean our dance before showcasing it, and making sure we're a hundred percent clear on the steps so we can give our all to the performance. I found that splitting up and creating our own portions of choreography then coming back and teaching it the the rest of the group really helped with the storytelling aspect as we would explain why we had chosen specific movement which was beneficial for staying on track. One problem I found we were having is creating continuous movement rather than taking moments of breath and feeling the motif. I would like to take more time between steps to really make it flow instead of having just step after step.  We received feedback that we seemed to be favouring one side of our motif then the other ...

Over our choreographic process we have been reviewing Christopher Bruce's work and choreographic style. One of my favourite pieces that we have watched was 'Rooster', a piece Bruce made in 1991 and first performed in 1992 (Rambert, no date) I was drawn to this piece as Bruce incorporates modern, jazz, and classical dance and pairs it with songs by The Rolling Stones. Rooster is broken into eight sections with eight different songs. The final section named 'Sympathy For The Devil' consists of all 10 dancers spanning 7 minutes is a reprise of all preceding sections and features movement from each.  Rooster (Bruce, 1991/1994): 2014 revival. Photo © Tristam Kenton https://rambert.org.uk/performance-database/works/rooster/ 'Rooster' depicts the relationships between men and women with Bruce using 5 men and 5 women for the piece and plenty of partner work throughout. He conveyed sexual tension prevalent while growing up in the 60's (Timbadia, S 2016) The dance...

We explored many different choreographic devices in our last class such as abstraction, contrast, inversion, distortion, embellishment, repetition, and fragmentation and talked through which ones would be most beneficial to our process. The message of our stimulus is based on two ideas and the difference between the two so we thought contrast would be a good starting point for creating. We split into two groups with the task of one creating a peace section and one a violence. This allowed us after to inspect what kind of movements we thought belonged in which and how we can continue this contrast throughout the piece.  I also thought repetition would be a useful device for our choreographic process. After researching Christopher Bruce the other week I realised how important it is for his work as it reinforces the message and idea for the audience, and as we have two contrasting motifs running through the piece at all times I thought by taking movements that represent each one in th...

We chose Christopher Bruce as our practitioner as we hadn't heard of him as much as the other choreographers and it sparked our interest as Rambert have become one of the centre points for contemporary dance, and he was the artistic director until 2002. His choreography caught my attention because of his fusion of so many styles together such as contemporary, jazz, ballet, tap, and ballroom and how easily he blends them together. I researched Ramberts web page for information about Christopher Bruce and his works. I hadn't realised it until we watched some of the videos on YouTube of 'Rooster' that I actually had heard of Christopher Bruce before, I remember watching Rooster last year and being fascinated by it. His themes are vivid such as youth that we wanted to make not of stylistic techniques he uses to get his messages so clear. Rooster (2022) We also watched 'Swansong' which gave us another angle into his stylistic features. I noted he uses symbolic and re...

 In our last session we began choosing our stimulus and music. We explored 5 different pictures or pieces of writing and what message we thought they conveyed. By doing this it allowed ideas to come to the surface and was easier to make a choice. The stimulus I chose was 'Flower Bomb'/'Love is in the air' or 'Rage, Flower Thrower' by Banksy.  Thursd (2021) I was drawn to this because of it's many titles, meaning it doesn't limit it to just one idea. . When brainstorming ideas of what it could mean there was a strong message of juxtaposition. The man in the painting is dressed in black perhaps riot gear and looks angry, but holds a bouquet of colourful flowers. The contrast means we can experiment with sharp, fast movements and slow ones and how they mix.  When given the music choices we felt it was important to choose something that enraptures the contrast of our stimulus. Our chosen song was 'Chronicles of a Hero' by Eternal Eclipse. The song so...