The Forming of Ideas:

The formation of our ideas:

At the end of our third week, we were placed in the group with whom we would perform our 10 minute assessment piece in late November. Our team of 6 wanted to choose a stimulus that would enable us to: express a powerful theme/narrative, convey a fundamental message, and encourage the viewer to reflect upon the ideas being communicated through the dance. We all agreed that, whatever the theme, the real aim was to galvanise a new sense of understanding through the art of movement. 


With this criteria in mind, we contemplated various themes. We questioned, what had been present/persisted throughout history.  What problems had overshadowed us despite the development of humanity? Thoughts included: Women's and Human Rights, environmental problems and poverty.  All these themes prompted rich and diverse ideas, however, we ended up settling for a topic that we knew we could easily track throughout the human timeline, that has persisted in various forms since the start of human evolution - War.


Excited by the possibilities of our theme, we immediately set a task to investigate six prominent figures who had participated in a war at some in the past.  Having been captivated by the story of Joan of Arc when just in primary school, I looked more closely into her story – her visions, her courage in leading an army to battle and victory at Orleans and her subsequent death by burning in 1431.


We decided that we would not try to depict one specific war, e.g. World War 1.  Instead, we wanted to demonstrate that whatever the era, and despite the pomp and ceremony that often surrounds fighting forces, this only camouflages the reality.  Whatever the war, death, pain and suffering linger for the duration of the lives of soldiers and their families.


Our goal is to express the repercussions of war and to exhibit its repetitive nature. 

 

Comments

  1. rosabella murphy7 November 2020 at 05:38

    This is a great blog Louisa in which I enjoyed reading. I feel your chosen stimulus of war will be very effective and I look forward to watching you final piece. I like how you have all chosen to research individual people who where effected by the war as I feel it will allow you to achieve more of a connection to your idea.
    Will you include these individual characters within your choreography?

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    Replies
    1. LouisaBratby4 December 2020 at 07:43

      My group and I did consider using the researched people as prominent characters in our dance but ended up not doing so. One of the very early ideas we had was to pin a picture of our researched person on ourselves and have the dance split into 6 sections, having roughly 2 minutes on each person’s story. We concluded that this would become very confusing for an audience as we would be jumping around time and history. Instead we chose to express the overall impact War has on a people, despite the point in history the repercussion is always predictable. We have not however forgotten about these individuals and instead intend to project some of the character qualities they all shared into our movement.

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  2. Lucy Imamzade11 November 2020 at 07:15

    This is a very informative and detailed blog Louisa. I like how you explained what you wanted to portray within your choreography as well as extra research on Joan to widen your knowledge. Did you face any personal challenges this week? If so, how did you overcome them?

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    Replies
    1. LouisaBratby4 December 2020 at 07:50

      I think the general challenge this week was figuring out how we would express our message in the best possible way. We didn't want to make the stimuli too confusing or too broad. With further research and discussion we managed to condense our general stimulus, War, into a smaller focused area- as I said in the blog, "to express the repercussions of war and to exhibit its repetitive nature."

      Delete
  3. Nanson29 November 2020 at 07:56

    Being in your group, it's interesting to see how our ideas have changed. Are you happy with the route we have taken? Do you think our end would would have been different with this research in mind?

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    Replies
    1. LouisaBratby4 December 2020 at 07:55

      I feel the route we took was most effective to express our message. I believe if we had included these individuals, we would have drifted from what we wanted to communicate. I also think they would have distracted the audience from understanding our overall messages and themes.

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