Solo Sketch- Reflection on my process.

Formative assessment-Solo Sketch- Reflection on my process.

Title of my piece-Restraints.

The process for the making of my solo sketch has been a big learning experience, that at times was very challenging. For me, choreographing material has always been the biggest struggle, purely because not only am I exposing myself as a dancer but me as a person. I find it very easy to perform set material, because to the audience I am entertaining them as a character. The audience know in reality that isn’t who I am but there is no direct relationship between the audience or me as a performer. This also reflects me within life, only my close friends and family know the real me. I would rather play a character dancing than be rejected or laughed at for exploring the way in which I wish to move.

    My stimulus was of a cowboy lassoing a horse, on a desert backdrop. This immediately caught my attention and brought back memories of my time spent in the Grand Canyon while travelling. From this picture I picked out two key areas; the horses’ wild main and the restricting ropes. These I thought were two very conflicting images. At first the freedom of the horses’ main, reflected the feelings of freedom I had felt while away and made me passionate about the choreography. Constructing a mind map with words such as: vast, running, expansive, I began to improvise while embodying the word. I later did this for the image of restraining ropes and then began to film this. From this I began to choose and build up a movement repertoire, that reflected my stimulus. After this Hannah and I shared what we had so far and gave each other feedback. My feedback was that I needed to explore using more body parts to demonstrate vast space and freedom. Not only my arms and legs to indicate it. This I did, by holding my arms behind my back. I found that my torso played a very important role and explored within this. Then it came to show a working progress to the group and gain peer feedback. I showed the improvised restricted movements I had worked on  at the very start and also the repertoire of movement about freedom. From this I gained essential feedback that I had not noticed about my dancing pattern. This being, for the freedom movement I had just used movement I was very comfortable with; ballet jetes, pirouettes and contemporary runs. Someone stated

     “ I felt like I was watching a contemporary dance class, but the distorted movements you were doing on the floor intrigued me a lot more.”

       This was a very fair criticism that I felt was necessary within my development to honestly portray my emotions about my subject matter, rather than doing what I knew. Revisiting my subject matter, I discovered another emotion I had written down on my mind map that was coherent with the distorted  movements I had improvised. The feeling was, coming back to education and the reality that is normal life, I realised how restricted I felt, having structure and there not being a lot of freedom. Taking this as my topic and the image of the ropes as restraints, I went back to my movement and explored putting myself into impossible positions how I would get out of these. This led to an exploration of different body parts and levels.

      I believe I maybe concentrated to much time on exploration of distorted shapes and the restrictive quality I was trying to portray, I never left myself enough time to look in detail at my spacing and timing. That is why a lot of the restricted movements I do on the upper level, are more about struggling to move within a distorted position rather than using a lot of movement. Next time I will definitely allocate more time to do this and consider portraying the idea through the timing of movement. I believe that motivating myself within the studio outside of class, is something I need to work on. I found the tasks that were set in class helpful and think this would be beneficial to apply these to my outside studio practice. However uncomfortable the tasks and improvising were, to begin with, I’m glad I took them seriously and threw myself into them, because I feel like I have pushed myself as a choreographer.

      To conclude I believe I’ve gained a lot from the experience, it has given me a lot more confidence within improvising and has opened me up to a new way of working.