Blog Three - Choreographic Devices and Developing Material

 - What choreographic devices have you chosen to use?  

Before working on any choreography, we did class activities allowing us to explore ways of developing ideas from different stimuluses. One example is we split up into groups and were given a picture stimulus, I have attached the one I was given below. We discussed our initial ideas and found new ideas developed from our individual thoughts. Concluding the image represented two sides of the brain, the creative side expressed through the splashes of colour and the academic side shown through the equations and monochrome colours. In terms of choreographic devices we used mirroring showing the two sides of the brain and we used action and response to interpret how the brain works as the brain sends signals and the body reacts.

This helped me explore ways of creating material and was passed through into our assessment piece really well. When we began choreographing we took this idea to represent the brain using a group formation that moves as one linking to the brain surrounded by the emoji's. We then used cannon dispersing from the group formation creating a split focus whilst travelling in our own individual pathways in the emotion of our chosen emotion. I decided to represent the emotion and feeling of love. Everyone has their own individual emotion therefore communicating the theme of our piece of the all the overwhelming emotions and personalities of someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder. I learned that it’s important to use choreographic devices that allow the movement to link to the original stimulus, representing an aspect to communicate the intended message to the audience.

                                  (Biomedical Odyssey Life at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, 2020)

- Has using one choreographic device helped you to develop an idea into something else?

Yes, for example in the beginning section when we use cannon to disperse from the group this lead us to think about how this can represent different overwhelming emotions making up the whole brain. This then lead us to think about how using our own pathways to travel creates a split focus for the audience and represents the chaotic clashes of personalities inside someone's head with DID. ‘DID is a rare condition in which two or more distinct identities, or personality states, are present in, and alternately take control of an individual’. (Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder), 2019).

- Bibliography - 

Biomedical Odyssey Life at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, 2020. Left- Vs. Right-Brained: Why The Brain Laterality Myth Persists. [image] Available at: <https://biomedicalodyssey.blogs.hopkinsmedicine.org/2019/05/left-vs-right-brained-why-the-brain-laterality-myth-persists/> [Accessed 28 October 2020].

Psychology Today. 2019. Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder). [online] Available at: <https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/conditions/dissociative-identity-disorder-multiple-personality-disorder> [Accessed 30 November 2020].