Friday 16th October (Dance Guernica Lesson 1)

This lesson was the start of a short dance project based on Pablo Picasso's painting 'Guernica'. It depicts the scene of a small village being blown up in the second world war and the devastation and pain of the people there, it was very crowded as the bombers strategically dropped their bomb there when they knew the village would be busy and this is shown in the painting with images that look like hands reaching out, crying faces and odd limbs in crooked positions. We looked at the painting and discussed how we can use this as a stimulus and created a mind map of words to use as inspiration for our choreography.

We then wrote a list of words that would create movement in our dances-

·         sharp

·         heavy

·         control

·         fast

·         punching

·         repetitive

·         attitude

After this we were taught four positions that related to the words we had come up with, they involved reaching, pushes and lunges in a desperate way to show the emotions listed above. We then decided an order for these to go in, I decided to have my floor positions first to act as if I was climbing up and out of rubble to survive. After this we created 3 of our own that fitted the brief, I was on the floor curled up for one, crawling for another and reaching for another, we then added these to out original 4 in order. We were then taught a floor sequence and a travelling motif. I found the floor sequence quite fun as I have not had that much experience in this and I feel I did well in creating levels and contrasts in speeds. The travelling motif was a challenge for me as we had to leap and this is something I need to work on, I needed some help from others but I got it eventually.
Following this we got into groups, I was with Charley, Paige and James. We started with our beginning position on the floor huddled and stretched out, we did this to symbolise hope and courage. We tried to use the picture and try to create some of the shapes and atmospheres with our bodies through the tempo and formations we used. To finish the lesson we performed these and self assessed ourselves. I thought as a group we had good unison, our facial expressions were realistic and effective because they correlated well with the feeling of disaster of the piece and our movements. Our dynamics were also really effective in that they showed the people dying and also the people surviving. For next lesson I would like to finish the dance and create a good ending for it and also explore crossing pathways.