Art as a political tool

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 we improvised floor work with the idea of travelling through oil. We discovered a pathway that we could all travel and began to choreograph the movements. They were very slow, elongated movements, as if we were trying to escape the oil. There would be moments where someone would rise to knee level but could not escape the sticky oil pulling them back down. We did this by using contact work and dragging/ guiding each other through the oil. 

In our next session, we chose 3 key words from any of the pictures from the previous session. Our words were: constant, DNA and anticipation. As a group we created 4 different movements for each word. We labelled these 1-12. These movements didn’t link to the others, they were all completely separate. Then we used chance methods. We rolled a 12 sided dice to give us 15 random numbers, some were repeated.  We had to link together our 12 movements in that specific order to create a phrase. This was a challenging task as we had many movements on the floor so most of our transitions involved moving from stood up to the floor. We were then asked to pick a number between 1-4. Our group picked 2 and we were given a song called Fade Away (instrumental) by Zack Hemsey which we had to make our choreography fit with.