Caitlin Bell choreography

In this lesson, we started creating longer pieces of choreography. We did this by choosing one of our motifs, the marching motif, and deciding to use it in the very first section of our piece. A motif is a small phrase that can be repeated and developed throughout the choreography. We then developed the motif and created just under a minute of choreography which is shown in the video below. We also incorporated our gestures from the previous lesson. For example, we do a soldiers salute in cannon. At this point, we don’t have music for this section, however we have ideas on how fast we would like the counts to be. A typical soldiers march is 120 beats per minute (bpm) so we decided to look for a similar metronome sound. After this, we began to look for music to use in one of our other sections called PTSD. We listened to a variety of music from Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Max Richter and songs from dramatic movies. Each member of our group will come up with a small phrase which we will ...

In this lesson, we were given a task to come up with gestures. A gesture is a small movement that is recognisable to anyone. For example, covering your mouth with your hand shows that the person is feeling shocked. Each group member individually came up with a gesture that linked to a specific section of our choreography. My gesture was from the fear and panic section. After we’d created our own gesture, we showed the group and together we developed each gesture in different ways. This was helpful because we can still use the gesture multiple times in our choreography but each time it will be slightly different with the developments. The video below shows each gesture and how it was developed. Our teacher then showed us a book by Kate Flatt called “Choreography: Creating and Developing Dance for Performance”. We looked in detail on page 158 about “establishing a world for the audience to enter” (Flatt, 2020). Kate Flatt talks about how we should begin the piece, how boldly or gently we...

We have now been put into groups of 6 and these will be our groups for the assessment. For our choreography we have a choice of any stimulus or idea. Our group sat down and had a long discussion about all of our ideas. We were all really keen on one idea: war. All of us really liked this idea because there are hundreds of ways to develop and interpret this stimulus. In our 4th session, our group split into pairs to create 3 different motifs based on fear, happiness and a soldiers march. Each pair then taught the whole group the motif and we learnt each one. We also thought of ways to develop the motifs such as different levels, using cannon and bigger/ smaller movements. Then we started to create formations for the motifs. Working on our motifs was helpful as we now have  starting points for our choreography that we can build upon.  We can also repeat our motifs throughout the piece but with slight changes each time to keep the choreography interesting.  https://youtu.be/...

In our third session we were given a translation task in groups. The first person was given a word and had to come up with a count of 8 inspired by that word. Some of the words included: heavy, loud, gather, tick, gentle and itchy. The 2nd person in the group would watch this phrase once whilst the others were facing away. Then the 2nd person had to remember the choreography in as much detail as possible to show the third person. Once the whole group had a go, we watched the first person and the last complete the phrase. It was interesting to see how the phrase had changed from start to end. At the end of this task, each group had 8 different pieces of choreography: the original phrase and the final phrase for each person. We then put all 8 phrases together to make one big piece of choreography. To make our piece interesting, we used cannon. At the end, each person would dance their own original phrase all at the same time. After 5 times, one person would stop and stand still whilst th...

In our first session we were split into groups and were set a task. There were 5 different stimuli, all of which were pictures, that we had to annotate in our groups. We were given 3 minutes per picture. As we moved on to the different pictures, the task became much harder as there were already many annotations written by others. However, this helped us to think deeper into other people’s points and add extra detail. After we finished annotating all of the pictures, we had a group discussion on each one. It was interesting to see how my groups annotations had developed from other people’s ideas! Then each group chose a specific picture. My group chose the one of a man covered in oil at an art display. We had to create 4 counts of 8 inspired by this stimulus. We decided to start our piece laid on the floor in the fetus position, exactly like the man in the picture. Then we used floor work for the entire piece. We decided to focus on the oil. How it would feel to be covered in oil. Then ...