A really challenging and difficult morning and I am not going to dwell on the problems – that is for you to do as part of this blog. What is interesting though is that all of you seem to have lost sight of the fact that despite the problems encountered you all managed to produce work, you all created a performance to show, and that is worth reflecting upon.
Work in larger groups will get easier and Royona and I will employ strategies to enable you to engage with small group work in a less stressful and more organic fashion.
What you must not do is to take today’s session out of context and judge the whole semester’s work on the basis of what went on today. You have worked incredibly hard thus far and with great commitment and you have to have the confidence in yourselves to take this into semester 2.
This week then, can you reflect on the following:
1) There was a sense of you falling into bad habits – what are those habits that you relied on and how do they contrast with the good habits that you should have been employing?
2) Why do you think you relied so much on discussion when we have spent so long working on reaction and impulse?
3) Having gone through the process and produced a performance, evaluate that performance in terms of its strengths rather than its weaknesses.
Bahok, Akram Khan Dance Company
Exploring Liminality
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6 comments:
I really enjoyed todays session, our group worked well together and I got chance to work with some people that I have never worked with before. I know alot of people found todays session hard as its the first time we've worked in groups of 7 or so. However it is my belif that if people employed the devising technique we were taught to create work they may have found it a little easier. It seems silly to me that we should be taught this technique and then as soon as the lecturers arent telling us specifically to use it forgetting that it even exists.
With reference to discussion, at the end of the day there are people in the group who love to talk and I cant see this changing. There are times when the class as a whole has immense focus and there is not a need to talk. However as soon as work detiriorates into a debate then the performance suffers.
In terms of our performance, like i said at the beginning I was pleased with how the devising process and I think our ability to work colabritvley was one of our major stregnths. With reference to weaknesses I tihnk at some stages there was sense of doing certain lifts or moves just for the sake of doing them and that we didnt manage our time as effectivley as we could have done, by this i mean we didnt have chance for a run through before the actual performance so it may not have looked as polished as we had wished it to. Other than that I was happy and thoroughly enjoyed working with my group.
Merrry Christmas everyone
Alex
1)The bad habit that I personally fell into was the constant need for talking when really it wasn’t needed and I’ve managed without it previous weeks. Saying that I felt that talking was used because people had so many ideas and when one person began to talk everyone fell into the same trap and retaliated with talking, where really we should of said from the beginning if someone has an idea then use the clapping technique because then were more focused and don’t have an excuse to talk.
2)At the beginning I said to my group that last week working with Blake we said shall we just play? So I thought maybe this technique could work again. But when people have a difference of opinion that’s when the discussion came into play, not only was it a discussion on what we needed to create but also the way we worked.
3)Watching the other performances before ours, I remember looking at Edward going ours is terrible compared to that but when we came into the discussion at the end of the session and people began to say that even though we used pedestrian movements rather then more physical ones, we still managed to create a powerful piece. And looking back on it I agree with those people, when we first got the task and we began to play we did create more physical moves but the whole ensemble just did not work, so when Royona said scrap what we had, and simplify what we had it was less stressful. We did still chat about what we were doing a bit too much but we came up with something simple yet powerful.
Today’s session was very interesting for quite a few reasons.
The habits our group fell into were talking and I agree I was talking along with everyone else. Something happened to the group today which made things feel very weird. The bad habits were talking and overlapping each others ideas, however the good ideas were using the clap method which we did and managed to get somewhere. I am not too fond of the play sessions and would rather gather as a group and share each opinion but this isn’t always the way it is going to go.
Talking in the group seemed a way to throw all our ideas onto the table for everyone to voice their opinion but we all spoke in little groups and focus was lost greatly. Impulse usually happens for me when we are experimenting with the ideas. After we were told to use all of our tools from the pallet we wanted to use movements for the sake of them which Royona or Paul pointed out. We scrapped the initial ideas and then worked on something which was very basic yet effective without knowing it.
The performance had more strengths than weaknesses for me when looking back on what we created. The strengths were that we created a performance which left Lauren out with very simple movements. We did start off with using a card but the focus was aimed on the card with no meaning which was picked up by the lectures.
Looking back on today’s session it happened and it can only get better in semester 2. The group are able to create work which works really well and I hope today’s session does not effect the way the group will work when we return after Christmas.
Also forgot to mention. Anyone interested in coming along to tuesdays process and performance warmup starts around 10.30 so please come to room roughly 5-10 mins before we are due to start. Royona will probablly be there too as she said she would supervise us.
Hope to see you there.
I think that concidering how some people said they had trouble in their groups, we did ok. I think that in hindsight the first thing we should have dont is find ine point which would spark the narrative, and then play. However becuase we did it the other way round there was maybe more planning than nessacery. But once that one point was found it did flow alot better. Peresonally I don't think it was a major mistake as there was no negativity, just an easy mistake to learn from.
Again I think the discussion came from a lack of narrative but as I said above it was an easy mistake to make being the fisrt time, which I think now we know will help us work better next time. And it was a learning curve for accomodating more people.
3) I think that everyone had a fair amount of imput, and ideas were sparked from others previous ideas which were good. We all took turns to have our own section. I'm usually quite vocal and perhaps a little bossy from my point of view but although i did imput, i think I took a step more than I normally would as it was a bigger group. But I don't think that anyone really overpowered another in the group. I would happily work with anyone out of my group. And we were lucky as we had a good percentage of lads to with which was nice.
Merry Christmas Everyone xxxxx
sorry there were some typing errors. It was meant to say step back at the end sorry xxx
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