Mhairi Wallace - First Year Choreography

Wednesday 25th September During Lesson 3 we watched ‘In Countenance of Kings’ by Justin Peck. We analysed his work, saying our thoughts and feelings about the piece, whether there was a story line and movements and choreographic devices that we recognised. We also learnt about his choreographic process to help us choreograph a motif. Justin Peck uses drawings or sketches of geometric shapes to help him with his choreography as he uses the shapes as formations and pathways for the dancers. The first part of our task was to draw a shape on a piece of paper, which everyone drew a different shape or pattern. This was our ‘map’ which we had to follow within the choreography of our motif using the different shapes as either movements, gestures or pathways but they had to be linked back to the map as if we were following it. Initially I found this task quite difficult as I wasn’t sure where to start or how to include some of the shapes, but I got inspiration from trying to use diffe...

Wednesday 18th September During lesson 2 were shown different choreographic devices and how they could be used. We developed our previous motifs of either our name or our number and combined the motifs in pairs to form a sequence. We were given the task to identify any choreographic devices we had already used within our sequence and then we had to develop further by using 4 different choreographic devices and be able to explain where we used them. My partner and I decided to use repetition, retrograde, inversion and canon. By doing this we added more contrast into our motifs and increased the length just by editing and re using motifs. We then made up a motif using adjectives that describes our zodiac sign. I’m a Sagittarius so the strengths of my sign are insightful, superior, rational, brave, beautiful, lively, lovely and optimistic. The weaknesses of my sign are forgetful, careless and rash. I based my motif from the words using them as inspira...

Wednesday 11 th September We started the class with improvisation, beginning lying flat on our backs and gradually increasing level and energy/force in our movements, moving onto knees doing floor work and rolls and then coming up to standing and introducing turns, jumps, kicks and leaps. We then did a similar task across the room, starting on a low level, then mid-level to high level increasing energy level in the different stages adding more power in the jumps, kicks and leaps than into the floor work.   We then had another improvisation task where we had to make a motif out of the letters of our name using different body parts. We developed this to have different dynamics based off an adjective. I used the word bright so I made my movements more powerful and jumped higher, making my arm movements sharp and dynamic. We also did a task in which every number from our phone number equated to a different movement. 0 was a shunt, 1 was stillness, 2 was a jump, 3 was a turn, ...