Gestures
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 want to start, the physical senses such as touch and sound that we want the audience to see and how we want to introduce characters/ relationships. The same thing applies with the end of our piece. How bold or gentle do we want the choreography to come across and what do we want the audience to take away with them after watching our piece. This book was really helpful and gave many discussion points to our group. We spoke in detail about how we wanted to begin our piece. We decided to have everyone marching on stage together in unity, mimicking a real life soldiers march. This is to straight away show our theme of war and give the audience a clear starting point. One of our motifs was based off of soldiers marching so we decided to use this here and we will develop it further next lesson.
As a group, we spoke about the final section of our piece and what we want the overall message to be. We decided that we want to show that all wars end in the same way: death and destruction. We are including sections such as PTSD, fear and a minutes silence to really portray the affects of war. Our group talked about including repetition of certain phrases to emphasises that all wars end the same.
References:
- Flatt, K., 2019. Choreography: Creating And Developing Dance For Performance. Ramsbury: The Crowood Press Ltd, p.158
Good and clear blog post caitlin! I really get a sense of what you were working on thought the lesson! What did you think of the rest of your groups gestures? Did you like them?
ReplyDeleteThank you! I really liked my groups individual gestures as they were all very clear and recognisable to an audience. We have chose 3 to develop and use in our final piece.
DeleteThis is a brilliantly detailed blog with excellent attention to the use of Kate Flatts book, suggesting how it may help you in the future when creating work. I love how you have managed to discuss what you want the end of your dance to entail and how you may include a minuets silence to highlight how greatly the war still effects us all today. How do you think this will leave the audience feeling at the end of your dance? Do you think this may effect the overall performance and create an emotional connection with the audience members?
ReplyDeleteThank you for your feedback! We wanted to end with a minutes silence as this is a symbolic way to show respect that the audience will recognise. We hope the audience can relate to the emotions in the piece.
DeleteThis is another very detailed post! I love that the gestures that your group created are clear and meaningful but not literal. Is that what you were aiming for? How did you go about it?
ReplyDeleteThank you Devanshi! We didn’t want our gestures to be too obvious. Instead, we wanted to portray the storyline through emotions. This is why our choreography contains sections such as PTSD and fear so that we can show feelings rather than gestures.
Delete