Exploring movement and incorporating motifs WK 13

Tuesday 9th February 2016

This lesson we were working as an entire company opposed to our pairs that we'd been doing the last few lessons. Now that each pair had generated separate and unique motifs for their own devised chair duets and table stimuli, we were able to combine them all into one activity.

We began with two chairs in the centre of the room facing the audience. Our teacher asked us to walk around the space at a consistent speed.

 In a previous lesson we learnt afew counter-balances, there were rocks: one person on all fours with a tight core to enable their back to be stable, the second person jumps over the rock using their arm for balance, or sit their hips onto the rocks back and lean over and touch the floor. The other was a hip lift, one person stands up and wraps their arm around the other, bend their knees lean over slightly and turn. 
  We were told to incorporate the "rocks" and "hip lifts" into our movement around the space. In addition as the pace of the music and intensity rose as did our pace, dynamics and movement to fit in with Frantic Assembly's style of work, as learnt from my research.

At the start of the video we began at a low, steady pace around the space. Our special awareness was key, we had to try to be evenly spread out so that areas weren't congested with many members of the company. As the rhythm and speed increased we were to find a way onto the chairs to begin to perform the chair motifs learnt as a company or the chair duets we made in pairs either with our partner or solo. The aim was to try to not give anyone too much time on the chair to perform their motifs.

This didn't work well at first as people didn't have enough time on the chair to perform sections of their motifs before being pulled or pushed off.(1 minute 40 seconds So this was noted as an area to improve on next lesson.
Yet at (3:38) me and Iyla were able to complete our chair duets fully on the chairs. I believe this to of looked effective as our sharp dynamics suited the timing and pace of the music and added to the intensity.

Additionally to fit the style of Frantic, we needed to use unique and more aggressive looking transitions onto the chair as well as removing people off, to add to the aesthetics of the performance.