What Is Choreography?

What is choreography?

• The movement that makes up a dance piece
• The act of designing a dance
• The use of dynamics - How you perform a motif
• Expressions and gestures
• Themes
• Stimulus/stimuli
• Choreographic devices
• Motif- A series of movements linked together and often repeated in a dance
• Actions - What you do in a dance - jumps, rolls, rotations, stillness
• Space- formations, placement of dancers, levels, US DS, near, far, small, large
• Relationships - Solo, duet, trios, group, props and set, audience, body parts

Choreographic devices: 'a specific way of manipulating movement to develop dance choreography'

• Speed/tempo
• Retrograde
• Canon
• Unison
• Repetition
• Embellishment
• Fragmentation
• Inversion

'Rush' by Akram Khan

After looking at what choreography is and what choreographic devices are, we looked at a professional piece of work by Akram Khan called 'Rush'. 

'Rush' - Akram Khan Video Clip

We were asked to take notes whilst watching the clip and write down anything about the dance, any choreographic devices, use of space, relationships dynamics and actions.
Whilst watching, it made me think of wind or breeze as there was a particular moment where the dancers were stood standing with their both their arms up vertically at a 90 degree angle moving very slowly as if drifting and being moved by a wind or breeze. There were actions that the dancers did which reminded me of turbines, as the dancers rotated their arms quickly in a turbine style way. Dynamically movements ranged from being sharp and slow as there were times were the movement was slow and sustained and also times where it was quick and sharp. When there were moments of stillness there was a lot of spacial restriction. Relationship wise the dance was a trio. 

After watching the video we were told the stimulus of the dance was about the feeling of free falling and paragliding. After being told the stimulus of the dance this then made sense to the points that I picked out of the drifting in the breeze movement as that reinforces the stimuli as it shows falling in the wind. The spacial restricted movements was like being in the airplane and parachute and being in a confined space before jumping out of the airplane and having freedom and free falling. Another moment in the dance piece was when the 3 dancers were jumping and rolling from side to side  and using extreme speed which is in contrast to the previous section of confined space. The use of extreme speed shows the freedom of free falling.

After watching and analyzing the main points and choreographic ideas of the dance we then were taught a section of the piece. We then got into groups of around 4 and then developed the original dance piece by the use of choreographic devices. In our group the way that we developed our piece was using choreographic devices. We used: Canon, Unison, Speed/Tempo. By manipulating choreography and changing around choreographic can dynamically change a piece and create interest and diversity. As a group I feel we managed to follow the task set well and we managed to develop the original piece of choreography by using the use of canon, speed and tempo and use of stillness to create a different dynamic to the original piece of choreography and to develop it into a group of four of us to dance.

The developed piece of choreography that we did is shown below: