Creating Movement (1)

 In our first lesson on choreography and creating movement we experimented with chance technique which Merce Cunningham was famous for, and was how he devised some of his dances. Cunningham created some dances using chance techniques such as dice rolling, coin flipping, and improvisation to create movement and decide how many dancers to have in his pieces. he would even sometimes only pick the music on the night of the show and have  dancers perform without practicing. The chance technique we explored in class involved pulling up the 15th photo in our camera roll and creating movement to do with the photo's theme, surrounding, colour, sound, and action. This gave us inspiration for movement when we had these headings rather than simply trying to choreograph from just looking at the photo. The second technique we dove into was picking 5 numbers at random and opening a book and writing down the words that matched the numbers. We then created movement to those words. I found this technique easier than the last as it provided the word for the movement which made it easier to come up with. I've learned that creating movement becomes infinitely easier when you have a stimulus or inspiration to guide you, and that it becomes clearer when you break it down to small tasks rather than dealing with a broad task.

I feel that learning about chance technique will make my creative process more straightforward as the idea of choreographing is daunting but knowing there are techniques as small as flipping a coin or pulling up a photo helps in dealing with that. I also found that in the task of pulling up a photo and analysing it it promotes a deeper thinking into a stimulus and will be incredibly useful when we begin to examine our own stimulus.