Problems and Solutions Within the Choreographic Process
When choreographing a piece as a group or alone issues might arise which will have to be worked through. In our most recent choreography class, some obstacles we faced were issues with spacing, time management, pathways, and transitions between sections. Seeing these issues being resolved also helped me identify potential roadblocks I might encounter when teaching my choreography and got me thinking about how I might avoid them.
Issues with pathways arose when staging the negative memory section for the first time. Olivia was colliding with Taylor to get into her space when travelling between the diagonal line into the 3,4,2 formation. To combat this, Olivia and Taylor swapped places which allowed them both to get to their positions for the next section without colliding.
A similar issue of transitions came up when linking the positive memory section and the negative memory diagonal line formation. As these two sections of the piece were choreographed separately and went straight from one to the other, there was not enough time in between for some people, myself included, to get into the diagonal line. To resolve this issue Jess opted to remove a repeated bit from the end of her section to allow enough time for everyone to transition into the new spacing. Something that this situation made me consider is that as I haven’t set spacing for my section Ill take into account what Gabrielle spacing is at the end of her choreography and how I will transition out of that. I'm also going to think of a few variants for the end of my section of the choreography to accommodate a change of staging if needed to transition into Ella and Olivia's section.
Another issue that came up was our spacing during the second section in which we are all embodying different emotions. During this section, it was noticed that we were gravitating away from the left side of the stage, this resulted in there being a lot of negative space making the staging look lopsided. To combat this, Jess and I are going to stay on the left side for a longer duration of time before moving to the right to start the negative memory section. Portia is also going to double back on herself at the beginning of this section in order to stay on the left side. The result of this is that the staging now looks balanced throughout while still allowing people sufficient time to get to their place to start the next section.
During our last choreography lesson, we also noticed that we needed to focus more on time management when teaching choreography. Time management is a prevalent issue as we only have a limited amount of classes to finish the piece especially as we missed a session due to a Covid-19 scare . We decided that in order to be more effective, we should begin by roughly teaching the movement and then return to it further along in the process to clean the timing and choreography. This method allows for people to get the choreography into their bodies and practice it at home. Something that I took away from this is that I should plan out how I am going to teach the section of the choreography I'm responsible for in advance in order to save time. I am also going to record and upload a clip of my choreography to the group chat so that people can check if they're unsure of the movement.
I can see the problems you have faced and exactly how you have tackled these. It's great that you have used these to look ahead and adapt your work to save time. If you could use everyone's full names that would be helpful rather than nicknames. Also why not show us some diagrams on the pathway/spacing issues that you have and how you have rectified these with new tracks. In terms of time management is there anything going on in the current climate that may have affected your studio time? Have we discussed any other ideas in class to help each other learn the choreography even if they are not in the studio?
ReplyDeleteYou really go into lots of detail about the problems we encountered you also explained how to resolve the problems and what you where going to do in the future. You could maybe talk about the how we might video our sections with the counts and then send it to the group so they can practice effectively at home, as a way to improve the blog.
ReplyDeleteHi Ciara, lovely blog post! The level of detail you went into when discussing the issues we encountered and the actions we took to resolve them is great and I really like how, upon seeing the problems we as a group faced, you are going to take them into consideration when teaching your choreography section so that you're as time efficient as possible. Perhaps to improve you could go into more depth about the effect solving these problems had in terms of how it looks from the audience's perspective. Well done!
ReplyDeleteHi Ciara I really enjoyed reading this blog post. To make this better perhaps say what you are going to do in the future to avoid these problems.
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