Inspiration
For our choreography, we had two main inspirations to help us produce movement. These were Young Men by BalletBoyz and Sutra by Sidilarbi. We watched YouTube videos of these two performances which we found very helpful and gave us many ideas for our own choreography.
The first thing we watched was Young Men by BalletBoyz. The main part that stood out to me was the emotion that each dancer had. It felt haunting. Immediately, we knew that this is how we wanted the audience to react to our piece. This is why we have sections such as PTSD and chaos to emphasise the horrors of war. The choreography content in Young Men was very chaotic. There is lots of explosive movements to create power. We created a section specifically about going into war and were influenced by the movements that BalletBoyz used. We have included big leaps, drops to the floor, contact work in household groups and lots of strong unison to resemble the intensity of war. This piece focuses on the negative aspects of war and there is violence between characters. In our choreography, we decided to include happier sections such as the coming together. We did this to show that each solider has a personality, they are humans not just soldiers. This will hopefully make the audience form an emotional connection so that when the intense sections start, it will have more of an impact.
The second piece we looked at was Sutra by Sidilarbi. This was where the inspiration to use sticks as props came from. As a group we were fascinated by how the Shaolin Monks were able to use their sticks to create such intricate and impressive movements. At first we were unsure of how to incorporate the sticks but Sutra gave us many starting points and ideas for our own choreography. Throughout the piece, many of the dancers used their voices to create sound and dynamics. We decided to use this in our piece where Lucy shouts us all to attention. Sutra is very fast paced and high energy. We have been inspired by this however, we also incorporated slower movements with the sticks to create contrast and make the dynamic movements stand out more effectively.
Young Men is about war so the dancers have much more emotion and it is easier to follow the storyline compared to Sutra. However, the tricks and choreography in Sutra are executed by highly trained Shaolin Monks which allows the choreography to be more intense for the audience to watch. Overall, BalletBoyz were the main inspiration for our piece, especially giving us ideas for the story we wanted to tell the audience. However, we got many of our prop inspiration from Sutra.
Well don’t caitlin! This is an excellent blog post. I found it really interesting how you have used both pieces as your inspiration but in different ways. Did your group struggle to think of ways to incorporate the sticks into your piece? Or did you find it easier after watching Sutra?
ReplyDeleteThank you Erin! At first we did struggle to incorporate the sticks due to how big they were. We found that watching Sutra gave us many starting points which made choreographing with the sticks much easier.
DeleteYou have extracted some very good aspects of these works, and I can see how they have strengthened your own. I also found it interesting to read about the choices that you made differently to these choreographers! It seems that 'Sutra' is quite different to your piece. Once you had been inspired by the use of props, did the movements change to fit your theme more closely?
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment! Yes Sutra is very different to my piece, in fact the only similarity is the use of the sticks. Most of our choreography using the props came from the inspiration of Sutra however our other movement inspiration came from Young Men therefore we didn’t really need to change movements.
DeleteI really enjoyed learning about your inspirations throughout this blog and how you used specific aspects from each of these to improve your dance. The use of props being used throughout your dance to represent war yet also linking to the movement created by the Shaolin monks was a very clever aspect to include throughout your choreography. How are you specifically using your emotions to creating the feeling of PTSD, making it evident to the audience? Do you think this will impact your final performance?
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment! Our aim was to make a big emotional impact on the audience during the PTSD section. It’s such an upsetting topic that we really need to have a strong use of facial expressions to convey the symptoms of PTSD. We hope that this will make the audience form connections to the characters therefore, at the end of our piece they will feel the emotions.
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