Week 9:

 Week 9: 

During the week, we managed to finish all choreography, connect sections with seamless transitions and perform a full 10 minute run through to our peers. We worked on making the steps and timing as familiar as possible, allowing us to solely focus on the quality we gave to movement and expression.

During our chorography lesson we created our PTSD section. We started by recording an improvisation, we visualised and embodying our characters and were guided by the haunting, but beautiful, Moonlight Sonata. After selecting the parts we liked from the video we refined our individual phrases. We agreed the initiation of movement would come internally to express vulnerability and display the soldiers' mental scaring. Weak and traumatised, a combination of slow draining movements combined with sudden impulsive ones express their skittish and confused minds. We reveal a mass of damaged beings previously so vibrant, so innocently keen now detached from the world and one another. We demonstrate this through movements like circling one another puzzlingly.  

We then moved on to the final section, One Minute Silence which is our final respectful part of the piece. We had a clear vision of what we wanted; a series of simple synchronised gestures. We include outreached arms, bows and slow mournful walks staring into the audience. A final pleading cry for change... only riddling the audience with guilt as they know this will not happen. 

Teacher Feedback: 

The full run through gave us a perfect opportunity to see what needs changing and refining: 

We need to exaggerate our movements to the fullest in the PTSD section.  We will do so by exploring more exposed positions to increase the idea of helplessness which inevitably should intensify the audiences' emotional connection.

Nathan is to count with more authority and command during the Marching section, this will make it more realistic and add to the overall dynamic impact. 

We still need to work on making the transitions into each section seamless, small unneeded/ ineffective pauses are still present at parts. To improve, we will analyse and identify these section and insert more purposeful movement to fill the gaps. 

The last notable point of feedback was to focus on everyone having the same movement quality when  dancing in a unified group. Small details like slight changes in dynamic, height of arm or leg extensions can obstruct the overall collective impact. This is incredibly important in our Marching section. To do so, we will spend quality time examining details and how each movement should be performed.