Devised Dance based on a Stimulus

For our final dance performance for this unit we were allowed to choose what ever theme and stimulus for what we wanted to perform. To get the best grade i wanted to explore a style of dance that i felt the most comfortable with, so once i had decided to go with contemporary dance, i started to find a song. My favorite song that i found was a song by Netsky, called 'Forget What You Look Like'. I mainly went for this song as i thought that it had a variation of tempos in the song that i could explore.

The stimulus that i was to follow was the theme of betrayal between two brothers, i thought that this would work within a male duet as it would give us more reason to explore contact, which doesn't always come naturally in a male duet rather than a mixed gender. The main story line would be that one of the brothers is more successful than the other and throughout the dance it would all be very competitive between the two characters.

For this dance i got some inspiration from a dance choreographer called Conner Scott, he really explored very close proxemics and likes the dancers to have contact. I felt that this was key for our theme to show the battle of the two characters in the dance. We began the dance with simple motif that involves hitting arms on each other, which created a dynamic opening.

Throughout the rest of the dance we included some unison phrases, which i devised from some of the past phrases which incorporated some of my past devised performances from this unit. One section that i thought was really effective was in the build up in the song, where i was really pleased with how myself and my partner worked in timings, it started off with a spin, going into a floor work motif. To fill some time within the dance where there was not as much happening in the dance, i added a section were we would just walked around the performance space, where we were waiting for a section in the music, i think that this worked well as it showed a connection between the characters as we maintained eye contact but also kept the energy up in the dance.

Overall i was really happy with my dance that i performed, as i think that it really showed off the stimulus that we were exploring. For the performance i felt that i kept the character up well, and also showed a contrast between the two characters, me being the more dominate character and my partner being weaker, which was shown by my character pushing the other to the floor at the end.