Introduction- Lesson 1 & 2

 Introduction to Year 2 Choreography

In our first lesson, we had five different stimuli placed around the room, below are the pictures of each stimuli. The stimuli used were art used as a political tool.

Artist: Adrian Brandon Title: Stolen - Portrait of Breonna Taylor 26 years old = 26 minutes of colourhttps://www.adrianbrandon.com/stolen

Artist: Amy Scaife Title: Human Cost – Protesting cultural institutions for taking money from companies that have connections to unethical/immoral behaviours. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/boards-museums-money-2019-1600507

 Artist: Banksy Title: Scar of Bethlehem – Depicting a wall that represents that of the one between Israel and Palestine with a bullet hole as the star of Bethlehem due to the ongoing conflict between the two countries. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/22/banksy-nativity-with-bullet-hole-in-place-of-star-unveiled-in-bethlehem

Artist: Las Tesis Title: Un Violador en Tu Camino – A Rapist in Your Path – A song with movement used by Chilean women protesting the treatment of women. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5AAscy7qbI&ab_channel=GuardianNews

Artists: Rael San Fratello Architects Title: See Saws - See Saws put up along the US and Mexican border wall so that people on either side can interact and play together

https://www.dezeen.com/2019/07/30/rael-san-fratello-us-mexico-border-wall-seesaw/

In our households we went to each stimulus and wrote around the picture detailed ideas, questions and words based on what we thought about the image in front of us. We were given two to three minutes to get as much put down as we could before moving onto the next one. After each rotation the later you arrived to a stimulus the harder the task became, this was because other people had written down all their ideas so you had to read through them, answer any questions that we could which were on the sheet as well as adding any additional ideas or thoughts or interpretations we had.

After we had explored each stimulus, we then went on to choosing our favourite one within our group. Once we had picked one, as a group we looked into how we could choreograph movement based on the image. Our chosen image was the Banksy: Scar of Bethlehem shown at the bottom.

 The main idea we wanted to show in this choreography was being united and highlighting the story behind the Nativity, which links to our beginning position was the four of us all intertwined with each other. As a group we also liked the idea behind the image of love and death and we wanted to explore this within the choreography showing the contrast between the two elements. We then performed the small amount of movement to the class and watch how the other groups had interpreted their chosen image.

Following on from lesson one, in our next lesson we had the task of bringing in our own stimulus within our household group. Between our group we had several different ideas but our chosen one was a Banksy street art piece ‘No Future’ shown to the right: (BBC, 2010). The image shows a child sitting on the pavement holding a balloon and the outline of the red balloon forms the ‘o’ in the phrase ‘No Future’. The graffiti picture was done in Southampton in 2010.

Every group had brought in their own chosen stimulus, there was five stimuli placed around the room varying from images to real life objects. Each group had to write down their own thoughts and interpretations of each one. After completing each stimulus note making, we then picked three words that were wrote down from any of the stimuli this process is called the chance method, for each of the three words we had to come up with four different movements which complimented their word. As a group we chose the following words: intertwined, abstract and continuous. We numbered each movement 1-12, then using a 12-sided dice a new number sequence was generated randomly, using the new generated number sequence we then fixed the movements together using transitions where necessary. Due to the sequence having been done randomly there was repetition of some numbers. After linking all the twelve movements together we then used the chance method again picking a number from 1-4 which randomly selected the music which we had to use for the choreography. My group chose the number one which was the song Night-Lone Wolf Trait Remix by Ludovico Einaudi, Lone Wolf Trait and Amsterdam Sinfonietta. As a class we got together and performed our sequences to our music.

Reference

unknown. (2010). 'Banksy' Southampton mural painted over. Available: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-11827202. Last accessed 5th October 2020.