Week 4 - Group Stimulus

  

In last week’s lesson we were put into our choreography groups, in my group is myself, Daisy, Abi, Devanshi, Mhairi and Caitlyn. At the end of last week’s lesson, we brainstormed some ideas for our group piece and later in the week Daisy sent us a variety of pictures and we were all interested in the picture below, this is an art piece by Lena Macka (Gillespie, 2019). We found this interesting as even though the people in the picture weren’t touching, they were all still connected because they were all holding onto a line or piece of string which kept them as one.


 

From this picture we then thought of the idea about social experiments, this was a very interesting topic and allowed us to do a lot of research, where we came across two different experiments one called the Asch Experiment and the other being the Bystander Effect. We were particularly intrigued with the Asch Experiment, which happened in the 1950’s, it was a test where subjects were asked to choose a line that matched the length of 1 of 3 lines. When asked alone the subjects all answered correctly but when in a room and the actors said the wrong answer, 75% of them went with what everyone else said, we felt this shown the power of other people and individuals not wanting to stand out or be different from the crowd (Swaim, 2020).

 

We then came to our second idea, which was the London Underground Map, this related back to our original picture as the lines were all connected and the routes always stayed in line. We also then thought of the aspect of the social setting at The London Underground and how its very busy, people keep their self to themselves, avoiding eye-contact and queuing.





 

After brainstorming and discussing our different ideas, we came up with our final idea which was Conformity Within Society, the message portraying the idea of encouraging individuality and making the audience think why are we influenced by those around us? As well as, are we fearful of individuality?

This idea also allows us to think of many different abstract ideas as well as use many different choreographic devices, such as accumulation and cannon, as well as the use of different levels and direction



Bibliography:


 Gillespie, I., 2019. Recognising The Tribe & Influencer Culture. [online] The Hemp Temple. Available at: <https://hemptemple.org/blogs/news/recognising-the-tribe-influencer-culture> [Accessed 10 October 2020].

 Swaim, E., 2020. Asch's Seminal Experiments Showed The Power Of Conformity. [online] Verywell Mind. Available at: <https://www.verywellmind.com/the-asch-conformity-experiments-2794996> [Accessed 10 October 2020].

Comments

  1. Mhairi Wallace27 October 2020 at 08:53

    I enjoyed reading about the process you went through to create your final idea of conformity, it is particularly interesting to read about the social experiments that you researched. At the end of this post you began to mention some initial ideas for choreographic devices which you may use, do you have any initial movement ideas or spacing plans which will link to your stimulus?

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    1. Megan Foster4 November 2020 at 10:19

      Thankyou for your comment Mhairi! We have started to think of different movement ideas and the use of repeating a few different motifs as well as the use of gestures so there is sometimes a pause in the piece and it isn’t always full on and confusing. We also want to use a variety of different formations and challenge ourselves with this.

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  2. Eloisa Goodall2 November 2020 at 11:16

    This is a really interesting topic and the journey you took to find this as a group shows a lot of development from the original ideas, what is the type of sound/music you'd like to use for this piece?

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    Replies
    1. Megan Foster4 November 2020 at 10:21

      Thankyou for your comment! We have decided to go for two different tracks which will be combined and we have chosen a neo -classical piece as this really works well with our ideas and how we want our piece to go.

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  3. caitlyn francisco27 November 2020 at 02:07

    It's really good how you've thought about what your message is and what effect you want to have on the audience- this will really help you durning the creative process. I also really liked how you got inspiration for your stimulus from social settings/aspects of today's society and I'm looking forward to seeing how you will present these ideas in your piece.
    How would you use the idea of a social experiment in your piece?

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    Replies
    1. Megan Foster27 November 2020 at 02:33

      Thankyou for your comment! We have incorporated the social experiment called the waiting room, which is the idea of when a beep goes off one person randomly stands up, this person is an actor, and then more and more people join in and carry on doing this even when the actor leaves the room. This social experiment shows the idea that no one knew why they was standing up they were just doing what someone else was doing.

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