Dance Three Day Workshop

After our briefing about making a dance film and shown some examples of films which experiment with the use of dance, we were organised to have a three day workshop with choreographer, Rachel Palmer. This is an overview of what we explored on those days.

Day 1- Rachel firstly went through the history of dance in film, covering the way dance in film has changed with new technologies and focusing on the modern uses of dance in front of the camera. We then began to explore the way in which bodies look on camera with different angles and concentrating on different body parts:

Day 2- We then started developing some initial ideas we could use as a starting point for our projects. We needed to come up with some actions and tasks that we could set the professional dancers we had coming in for the third day. I was working with Thomas, Shahid, and Joel. Thomas wanted to experiment with the ideas of starting from normal activities and having a dancer evolve into a full dance, like an infectious movement that spreads throughout the whole body. I wanted to experiment with mirroring and seeing whether you could get a dancer to interact through dance with a mirror image without touching the mirror. We merged these ideas together to create the idea of a dancer working with a mirror image in a mundane set of movements, when eventually the mirror diverts from this set of movements to provoke something more free flowing, and trying to grab the attention of the 'real-life' person. To experiment with this idea, we got a couple of class members to come up with a couple of repetitive movements and then having them run through this set of movements over and over, until we asked one of them to start slowly adding in attached movements but still staying in time with the original actions. The result was promising, and we were looking forward to asking the dancers to do this on the following day.

Day 3- As I said previously, myself and the group asked the dancers to design a set of repetitive movements, we put them into pairs and then observed their results. I was interested to see a lot of observable differences in the dancing styles and it meant we got a lot of varying results which we were perhaps not expecting. For example, we originally thought of having the dancers facing opposite each other and not touching, but we really liked how one pair crossed over each other in their actions and so it made us consider how we could try placing the mirror image in different places with respect to the 'real' person.

Later on in the day we also filmed two of the dancers together from a couple of different angles to give us some reference for later on. We really liked the dancing styles of Jo, a professional hip-hop dancer and Sophie, a professional contemporary dancer. They were so opposite each other in terms of dance styles that the way they interacted with each other really worked with our idea. I loved how Jo could use her hip-hop background to create the mundane, repetitive actions and I also loved how Sophie could do much more improvisation and really thought outside the box to break away from those actions. It created an interesting dynamic and gave us a lot to think about for the development of this idea.