7. Inspiration and Feedback

When creating choreography, it can be helpful to draw inspiration from the work of other practitioners. Often choreographers who have been in the industry have years worth of knowledge and experience behind their creative process, so I find watching interviews to be a valuable tool in learning different devices as well as how they choose to convey their stimuli in the movement. I also enjoy seeing different industry trends and what makes them so popular with the public. It can also be interesting to observe aspects that are similar to my own group's work and how the differences between them affect the impact of the piece. 


After watching excerpts from several artists, I found Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite's work to be most useful when comparing and inspiring our own practice. I admired how Pite clearly and respectfully conveys modern-day issues through her choreography.  In particular, her 2009 work 'Emergence.'  When Pite first created this piece for the National Ballet of Canada, it was the largest group of dancers she had worked with to date, and while looking for a possible parallel in nature to draw inspiration from, she landed on the concept of swarm intelligence. The nature of insects like bees and ants and how their societies work and function. (Pite, 2013) (Pite & Pacific Northwest Ballet, 2013)


(Sterling & Thomas, 2022)



Like our piece, 'Emergence', it mainly includes group work in unison. This similarity connects further as we often portray Charnlys illness through unified group work, adopting a similar 'hive-like' mentality. I especially enjoyed how Pite portrayed contrasting power dynamics within the piece through a series of duets. The movements she choreographed for the group sections interested me as each movement was very strong and accented, but as a group, the dancers appeared fluid.


Gestural hand movements and motifs, which we rely on quite a lot to convey the meaning of our piece, are also heavily present in 'Emergence'. An interesting contrast between the two pieces is how we use short, sharp head grabs to subtly show delusions. Pite uses prolonged head grab movements in repetition, which has a powerful and intimidating impact.  A reminder of how simple movement can be impactful. as well as adding light and shade to the piece in the form of allowing the more explosive sections of choreography to be contrasting. It was also helpful to observe how clearly the unnerving atmosphere of intimidation was communicated through the dancers' focus of eyeline alone. Obviously, this effect was aided through lighting and other stage production aspects, but eyeline is an element of our piece that I struggle with, so 'Emergence' provided a valuable reference for this (Pite, 2013).


The main aspect of feedback we received was concerning our performance of the piece and the execution of the steps. When rehearsing and choreographing the piece, we were at times possibly too focused on getting the project finished before the deadline that while on paper we had connected our movement to the stimuli, we had neglected to implement the artistry in the physical performance of the piece. This presented itself in both in our physicality and facial performance. For example, in the 'Fragmentation Section,' The choreography was created to appear disjointed and unsettling, but when dancing the section, we failed to implement the dynamics necessary to achieve this. To resolve this, we went through both the music and the movement to pick out points of accent as well as sections of movement we could perform sharper/softer to add more shading to the piece. Implementing these changes definitely elevated and brought our piece together as well as presenting our stimuli more clearly to the audience. 



Bibliography:

Crystal Pite's Emergence - excerpt (2013) YouTube. Pacific Northwest Ballet. Available at: https://youtu.be/88mnjR9ejxs (Accessed: November 28, 2022).


Pacific Northwest Ballet (2013) Crystal Pite's Emergence (Pacific Northwest Ballet), YouTube. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBe8Kc0i8nE (Accessed: December 3, 2022).


Sterling , A. and Thomas, L. (no date) Emergence - Crystal Pite, Pacific Northwest Ballet. Available at: https://www.pnb.org/repertory/emergence/ (Accessed: December 2, 2022).

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