Structure and Patterns
The video above displays rehearsal material created through one shared process – random generation. Whether the use of floor patterns, tempos, or plain order, each of our pieces showcases this notion of uncontrolled decision making in the creation of our final pieces. Therefore, when finding a way to highlight each of our pieces, why not continue with randomly selecting material? Even when combing three features – duration, order and tempo, there were still anomalies within the creation of the video that were also apparent in our original work also. For example, half the video shows only one slowed down video, this coincidently being at the beginning, and no videos of a duration of 2 seconds. From watching you may never spot these slight irregularities, but with this idea of chance allows interruptions that would never have had occurred if it wasn’t for this random generation.
Jasmine Lymn – Autopilot
Emma Woolley – Two and Two
Charlotte Hatcher – Arranged Disarray
Claudia Chrzanowski– Phrase, repeat, phrase
Holly Morris – Title
autopilot
Here you will see the order of each of my dancers’ phrases.
My work follows the idea of pattern and repetition and its importance in allowing disruption and chance to occur within the space. This is through the use of a phone number task where each number resonates to a specific movement created by my dancers, meaning each of their phrases is completely individual to them.
I then created another phrase of four movements, that I stole from their solos, to have 16 movements in total. These movement phrases were then split into blocks of four and randomly generated to complete a new order.
These orders created a sense of disruption as at some point you could be performing the communal material, but then split into individual phrases after. This disruption continued throughout my creative process especially when creating the base for my piece. I generated a very relaxed score which enabled my dancers to perform any material they feel, in whatever space they want, at any time. After completing once, I then asked my dancers to only perform what they could remember they did within the space next. This created some significant differences as some were dependent on others exiting/entering before starting themselves. So, when it came to completing my final piece, I recreated and combined these two scores and their own individual moments, but keeping the timing completely up to my dancers. This meant the idea of performing movements at the same time as each other could happen by chance rather than it being set. The use of randomly generated pauses within their phrases also allowed this chance to be heightened, as depending on when they start within someone else’s phrase, they could have a lot of the same movement or hardly any at all.
arranged disarray
My piece is based on organised chaos. I loved working through and organising movement into sections and then, messing it up by making it chaotic. To do this I helped each dancer to create a short phrase that included all of the sections just in a different order, and then I asked them to speed it up every time. I also started the movement with a small vibrating motion so the movement could grow and get more frantic. This was really interesting to work with, and I had a lot of fun with it.
Two and two
Two and Two, explores the idea of pathways and how one set pathway can be used to develop movement in different ways. The idea evolved from two of Paul Klee’s works and two pieces of music I felt related to these works, which happen to be the same score but with varying speeds. The Paul Klee works are: Site of Worship Kultstatte Abstract Line Drawing Art PL1 and Drawing Knotted in the Manner of Net – The music is Electric Counterpoint: III. Fast and Electric Counterpoint: II. Slow by Steve Reich and Pat Metheny. The dancers were shown these two pieces of art and music from which they were to draw their own random pattern. These were arranged on top of each other, these patterns became the focus of all the movement and space used. During this process these patterns were explored in different ways for example, looking at how they move through the body, how they move you through space as a floor pattern and where the dancers cross in the pathways how can they explore their patterns in relation to each other.
title
My starting point was an exploration into meaning, and how an audience’s interpretation of the meaning of my piece might be different to the one I had intended. I used a random word generator to create many sections of movement, each with a different randomly generated meaning. The final piece is constructed of these sections with many different meanings with little correlation to each other.
My original work had a soundscore of randomly generated words. These words could be seen to impose meaning onto my work, but ultimately it is up to the audience to believe it or not. Therefore the meaning of my piece is out of my hands. Instead it lies with the random word generator and whoever observes it.
It could be mean anything, or it could mean nothing.
And so, if you believe me, my piece is about a snowman.