Alison's posterous

The best I can be (choreographically speaking)

All of these I hope i've explained why in previous blogs.

  -Constant use of experimentation, if that's one thing I have learnt this term is that it is essential to develop and work with material in order to make things interesting to the audience.

  -Focus on lighting and set, it is crucial and changes a piece so much

  -A work may never feel finished, it may just be an on going work that changes every times it's performed and that is absolutely fine.

  -Try out as many ideas as possible, even if you do not use them.

  - Pay attention to what you have got an how you can use it.

Something completely random but an area of study I am interested in...

TPO Company

Children and Dance.

The TPO Company is an Italian dance company full of various choreographers from around the world who promote and research into projects that include interactive technologies within theatre/performing arts work.

With the ‘Children’s Cheering Carpet’, a machine developed by the TPO company which in the form of virtual gardens or art works it develops sensitive environments within a perceptive space. Which I find fascinating as it is such a huge development in technology that can and has begun to affect children’s development and approach to dance and their own ‘choreographic mind’. It allows the creation and allowing of physical relationships between kids, images and sounds, and an immersive theatrical space.

Children can begin to use their imaginations by using the installations to roll, touch, run or simply walk along various coloured paths or inside graphic interfaces such as natural environments such as various different gardens. Spaces in which arts and architecture are strongly connected, but especially spaces of beauty: our aim is to educate kids to an intimate appreciation of the beauty of arts. They say it is excellent for a physical relationship between kids, images and sounds, and an immersive theatrical space, allowing them to develop creatively.

The development of such an invention has allowed a “greater number and a broader range of sensors to be employed for the manipulation of sounds and images” by the audience and/or by performers. The combination of video-cameras, pressure and bending sensors, proximity sensors and microphones have allowed the company to achieve such creativity by whoever uses or looks upon.

The contact with the floor (mainly through feet) is was the sensors react too; people who feel confident will use all their body to interact with the images and sounds they find on the carpet. They try and ask the elder people, dancers and actors to lead the actions just with their body and no verbal communication. “Body language in this case is more appropriate to enter the artistic quality of the images and the sounds proposed”.

“Body language in this case is more appropriate to enter the artistic quality of the images and the sounds proposed, in addition to being more universal than verbal language. Indeed the presence of dancers helps kids or parents from all over the world to produce movements and ‘orient’ them towards a choreographic quality."

A little thing about Light...

It is said that there are different philosophical points and problem and “solving techniques that are worthy of attention when one does employ automated lighting in a straight play”. It does not have to be specifically the dancer and movement (although is clearly essential), but the lighting and it’s designer, who and which use automated fixtures must move in and out of various different works, set designs, different arts such as drama, music. It was said by Simon that our first lighting change of all stage left lights reminded him of a rock concert, which I totally agree with. A rock concerts need big light with big movement to complement big sound, which is what we tried and think accomplished in through choice of movement, stillness, bursts of energy etc.

Why we decided to do this..

Why ?

Why did we choose to do this on a whole, as previously stated in one of my previous blogs:

Light on stage is generally used to light up dancers, their faces, specific body parts, to create shadows – we found a way of using light to create something none of us had ever seen before as students at Roehampton. We were once told that what we were creating in our choreography classes were ‘works in progress’ they are not supposed to be dead set final pieces (not the exact words used, but along those lines…) so why should we not involved our audience a bit more, ask more from them rather than letting them sit there and get distracted by various different things in and around the space/seating. As someone who has clearly been an audience member on many I personally find it a lot more interesting when I am included a lot more, or asked of to do something other wise I become a day dreamer and find other things to look at (definitely not all the time, but it has happened).  That is not to say that everyone likes being included to such an extent, but it’s different, it interested us and end of the day unfortunately you cannot meet everyone’s needs! But I’m glad with the feed back we got from it, a lot positives with a few negatives J

The tiny important details...

Tiny important details of our final work and in general.

I have found in this last term that before I never really concentrated on details such as lighting and design set. Which is such as significant detail to our final work.

From previous classes in learning about lighting and what we can and cannot do, I have found a great interest for using light, ass it can change it so much. With the correct lighting even the slightest shift in space can create something so interesting to watch. Such as, when we were rehearsing Lee was watching and the change in me contracting my torso and lengthening was picked up almost immediately as the lighting behind me was blocked and then relit.

As we began straight in front of the audience we began as shields to them, where they could see our bodies, face, hair etc. So changing the focus of our eyes was made obvious, which contrasted as we went out into the space as the face was lost and only our silhouettes were created.

What we asked of our audience.

What we asked of our audience.

I think it is fair to say that we asked a LOT of our audience. To have a piece that is so bright and so powerful for a full 10 minutes can and probably was a lot for them to take in, adapt too and appreciate. I heard many comments after our performance evening from a few who had seen it in dress rehearsal saying it did not seem quite as bright as it did they day before, which I can only assume would be because they knew what was going to come… As for the audience members who had absolutely no idea what was going to happen, some of which not dancers and potentially not seen many dances before would and probably did either love it or hate it.

However it was in our criteria that we wanted to be hidden, we wanted to the light to create only our silhouettes and the only way we were able to be seen was if the audience focussed in on us intensely.

Lighting is usually used to light up dancers in the space, our lighting hid us.

By bringing them into the space and only allowing them to stand in a specific place made them (in my opinion) interested right from the word go, cause we asked  more from then rather than sitting them in an auditorium, they had to stand in a specific place and make sure they did not move.

Creating, developing and final decisions on movement. What we wanted, what we achieved.

Creating, developing and final decisions on movement. What we wanted, what we achieved.

Our main movement began right from the beginning, which is brilliant because we were able to experiment and develop into various different motifs and we were able to concentrate quite a lot towards the end of our time on tiny detail that we hoped was highlighted and noticed by our audience.

What we did: we each created a short movement phrase with the idea of what we thought of vision, the eye, being watched and so on. As we’ve all had different training and experiences it was obvious we were all going to come up with different movement but hopefully the same quality. Which we succeeded in, such as Kelly produced a short solo the involved a lot of slow and sustained movements which was brilliant as we were able to use particular moments which took us from stillness to more energetic movement and vice versa. Where as Lee used what could be described as more awkward ‘contemporary’ movement of basing his movement on every day life – which produced different levels and speeds of movement.

From this we taught each other each persons phrase so we has a massive chunk of movement that we were able to experiment with by pulling apart and re working with repetition, adding in stillness, playing with speed, unison, duets, solos, trios and so on. As we started with movement development so early with our final piece sticking with the similar idea to begin with, we were able to pay particular attention to details such as a slight tilt or turn of the head which is pretty essential what with our final setting of our piece.

It was from simply just rehearsing and putting together movement material where we came up with our ‘blinding’ light idea – where we were interested in using silhouettes with the use of light, to hide the body but create our outline.

What we wanted to achieve with movement was to be as idiosyncratic as possible, which we did with using all three different movement phrases from each of us and to use the lighting to create many different silhouettes that were pleasing to the eye… If audience could handle squinting and focussing on us in front of the lights.    

Starting point to our final assessment...

Starting point.

To collaborate a 10-15 minute work with two others dancers whom one of which you have danced a few technique classes with and the other never before, I originally thought that this task was going to be extremely difficult. However, after getting over that essential “I don’t really know how much I should say” or what opinions to say or keep to yourself – turns out, being in a group with two such people was probably was one of the best things to happen. As we came up with many different ideas from our own backgrounds, styles, ideas and opinion towards dancing and choreographing.

Similarities we all had, some of which we used and some we did not:

Likes- repetition, stillness, live feed, filming, snap shot images and silhouettes, taking simple and natural body movements and making them awkward to watch (rather than letting the body decide you stop yourself and turn it in a different direction/balance etc.)

Dislikes- Creating stories, putting idea's in audiences head, too much movement, under development of phrases, no use of enough of lighting/design/setting.

We began with the idea of Live Feed – where we took class time to experiment with different choosing where we could space it, thinking of audience placing and what will interest them and used rehearsal time out of lesson time to create movement. Although the film idea (although using two weeks to experiment with) we decided to ‘give the elbow’ to as we really did not have enough time before the given deadline to experiment enough with to create a work full to our potential.

Even though we did not go with the filming and live feed idea, it was a great start for us movement wise. As we went with the idea of using ‘being watched’ and ‘vision’ as what we wanted to try and perform in our movement.

Vision, the focussing of the eyes, what you can see and what you can’t see, light, depth of field, was our main focus and development for our final assessed piece. Where we used our desired setting, intense use of lighting to create silhouettes, long movement phrases of repetition, inserts of stillness and subtle movement changes that may or may not be seen by every audience member due to our choice of powerful lighting, a restriction of being frustrated from being blinded/not able to see everything which is what we wanted to impose on our audience. Deciding that it was potentially something that kept our audience either interested in the fact that they wanted to watch extremely carefully to try and see everything or to disturb to the point that they could not watch at all. 

Assessment Task 2

An extremely delayed response to Assessment task 2, sorry!

Work collaborated with Kelly. The ‘short and sweet’ essential details: One light source, one light change, 2-4 minutes. Go.

Our choreographic process followed on from previous lessons, where we had the opportunity to experiment within different tasks such as selecting different body parts to initiate movement; In my case the arm, head and right hand.  Which Kelly and I decided to begin with, from this we learnt that each of us were different in moving in that Kelly does not like to move quickly and often moves with a ‘soft’ quality. So from this we came up with the idea of pressure, where we focussed on the tiny details of moving through every part of the body being as idiosyncratic with the movement as possible. Such as rolling the entire hand on the floor taking minimum of 30seconds to do so, which to move one hand is pretty slow, later contrasting and in Kelly’s case with idiosyncratic movement she twisted in and out in different directions as quickly as possible but keeping at least one part of the body pressed to the floor.  We decided to use one franel and keep it close to the body as possible using a small amount of the space – where we sat our audience right in front of. We decided to do this because we felt the closer they were the more likely they were to notice the ‘tiny’ details such as the small shift of hair, the colour the finger turns (or body part) that’s pressed on the floor, the shaking of a leg from intense tension and the change in breathing from the faster more energetic movements.  By choosing to choreograph and experiment in a small space made our movement compact which was a restriction of ours, however it is what allowed us to be so idiosyncratic... that made more sense in my head than what it does in writing...

Refelection on Choreography Assesment Task 1

For our first assessment it was a development of what we had been working on in previous weeks. We all had the chance to watch each other’s (even though for my own group and another group only a specific number of people were allowed in due to limited space) which I found intriguing and very fascinating in the different ways people approached that task.  Stampy, Becci and I were a team of markers who assessed one other group. Although we were given a specific criteria to assess with I found it difficult to judge their work as they are people that I have known for a while now and felt like I should/could not be negative in anyway. In the long run, it helped having Stampy and Becci to discuss what we saw and relating it to the assessment criteria.

For our piece I would have loved to have had perhaps another week on it, to fully experiment with blacking the space out even more so because I agree with the negative point given that it was not quite dark enough, as the piece went on I felt like I (as one of the performers) could everyone and everything around me which means the audience were more than likely in the same boat. I would have liked to develop it further with more light changes and stillness which I believe could have been better with the space darker. Also to work on how the piece could end (another criticism) – perhaps “aaaand that’s it” is not the best way to end it, perhaps Emma asking everyone to leave with the lights off? Something for myself (and others) to think about in future works.