Dance Video - Workshop 2

This was another workshop to help us further develop our ideas and skills for this project.

Be Aware
We began by talking about what to be aware of when working with Dancers, Here is what we came up with:
- Fatigue, dancers will need regular breaks at least every 1 and half hours.
- Dancers need at least 1 hour warmup and the space they do this in should be warn to avoid injury.
- Keep the filming space warm during the day to again avoid injury.
- Provide water and food for them (Expenses) especially if you are not paying them.
- Respect the Dancers, Don't move them around, don't ask personal questions, don't talk down to them etc and just keep it a nice environment for them.
- Be positive, find positive language to direct them and never just say 'NO'.
- Video your rehearsals with he dancers to help yourself and the dancers recall what you have done.
- Have a First Aid kit present at rehearsals and on shoot. This should have cold packs for injuries in it along with all the usual first aid supplies.
- Floor must be swept and checked its clear to avoid dancers injuring themselves on anything left on it. Also if it is a very hard floor like concrete you should either allow the dancer to wear the appropriate footwear they need like trainers or get a temporary sprung floor if possible to avoid them injuring themselves.

Creating a Phrase/motif
We looked more into the actual process of composing a dance and useful ways to create short pieces of moments know as a Phrase or Motif:
- Firstly explain the idea and themes of the piece using language we developed in the last workshop to the dancer.
-Set up a task which will help them improvise a piece which will be along the lines of the movement and style you want. Remember to use effective language and as the improvise you can stop them or talk to them as they do so to point out specific movements you like.
- Then you the these moments you like and get the dancers to add them together and develop more to them with your direction and input.
- Once you have experimented and developed these moves and they are set how you want them you have a Phrase to work with.

Principles
Here are the 5 main principles/movements which can be used in dance:
1. Jumping: Lifting off the ground. This could be used in dance to represent freedom, joy, excitement, power etc or used to gain height, avoid and support a lift etc.

2. Turning: Spinning vertically or horizontally, rolling. This could represent confusion, stress, lack of control etc and can be used to change direction.

3. Travelling: moving in the space. This could represent a change, distraction, fear or intention etc or could be used to get to a destination.

4. Stillness: standing, siting or lying in one place. This could represent sadness, fear, control, isolation or reflection etc.

5. Gesture: using hands to signal. This could represent religion, power, status, emotion etc or be used to communicate or signal.

Developing Our Idea
In order to be able to pitch an idea at Dancers in a successful way and begin improv we first had to have a developed idea. My idea was very undeveloped and simply was just the idea of basing a dance on Phobias. However I worked with a group to make it more than that. This is where our idea got to:

We want to make a Dance Video based on a exploration of Phobias through contemporary dance, Accordance and elements of Contortion.
We want the Phobias to be embodied and expressed by the Dancers. We want the dance to not only present the Phobia but to also show the fear and tension created from these.
Phobias we have so far looked in to and would like to possibly include are... Claustrophobia (Fear of small places), Arachnophobia (Fear of spiders), Acrophobia (Fear of heights), Aqua-phobia (Fear of water), Nyctophobia (Fear of the Dark), Hemophobia (Fear of Blood), Pediophobia (Fear of dolls and puppets).
Movements we want our piece to consist of are - Dragging and crawling, Contortion, Possession, Demonisation, Speed constantly changing, Repetition and Reversing.

We then as we had time began to brainstorm what kind of moments we would use for each phobia to create the right kind of feelings:

Claustrophobia - lots of stillness, very limited space, turning in one spot, heavy breathing, levels move from high to low as fear increases.

Arachnophobia - a lot of fast travelling, low levels and crawling, Begin with the Dancer resembling the Spider through contortion stayed movement then develop on to show the fear so thats its a transformation from being the fear to then being the reaction.

Acrophobia - (2 Dancers) One person lifted up by the other but struggling trying to get down, finally dropped, low levels as if they pass out, possible miming as if on tight rope incorporated into dance.

Aqua-phobia - Gasping for air, struggling as if they are under water, lots of use of levels, sinking, drawing at the end.

Now that we had a much better idea of what we wanted to create and what ti was going to look like etc we got to meet a Professional Dancer to try out a improvisation task to test out our ideas after explaining them to everyone and the Dancer.

Our Improvisation task was:
- Firstly we asked her to do a short improvisation task of representing water but we asked her to represent it in a way which people could be scared of it so basically demonising it. She did this by first thinking through why water could be scary and we then gave her words like flowing and smooth to help her know the physical ways to move. She struggled with this task at first especially at making it scary as she personally doesn't have a fear of water but she began physically representing the water effectively even if it wasn't scary.

-We then asked her to be the person who was scared of water. We put some tense music on to help her with this. We explained that the fear of water comes from fear of drowning for a lot of people and asked her to maybe include elements of this. This task went a lot better as she built it up to become very emotional with lots of heavy gasping and frantic speeds and changes of levels. She said in her mind she imagined she was in a well and the water was rising and she had no way out. This work very well and I have learnt a lot about how to talk to the Dancers and how this idea could physically take shape now.
I also know now that giving examples of scenarios will help them get into the thoughts and feelings they need for the piece.