So far we have had two lessons on our new unit, we are at a stage of exploration and will be using this exploration and applying it to our devised pieces in a week or two’s time. In our first lesson, we discussed ‘Community’, ‘Home’, ‘Belonging’ and ‘Culture’. First we started off with a little warm-up activity where we would walk the space at different levels and speeds to help get us focused and clear our minds, then Mrs.Parr gave us an activity where she would say one of the four words and we would have to group up and create a still image out of it, leaving all interpretation to ourselves. This was quite a challenging activity because it really made us think and force ourselves out of normality and create more abstract work. Then we gathered around four sheets and wrote down our thoughts and ideas on each of the four words. Now I found this very interesting because we were able to explore what these each meant to us and read what others wrote, I found that a lot of us had the same idea that home is not the place/country/city but the people who are there for you and much more. Then we finished the class with the challenge of creating a motif piece with the still image for community, motif which is a reoccurring image, theme etc. When it comes to the motif, the use of repetition, pace and space can really affect the performance. During the time, I found that it was quite challenging but in the end, I learnt a lot about simplicity and how it can make a really big impact on the message you’re trying to convey. In our second class, we learnt about displacement and shared thoughts on how it feels and what it means to us. Then we started off with an activity called ‘Moving Images’ which I believe is a great activity because, it pushes us out of our comfort zones, leaves a lot of room for interpretation and helped me understand the word ‘displacement’ because once someone in front of you is gone you are left alone and with the lights and music I could really feel it and my classmates and I really had to work together to make this focused and interesting. I thought it was very successful and the discussion we had after it was really interesting because we heard all sorts of interpretations of the idea of ‘displacement’. Afterwards, we explored in more depths new ideas and we were given 20 minutes to work on a piece which could be connected to the images or entirely based on our interpretations and connections. This was meant to be a dream and my group and I was very directed towards distortion, levels, volume, repetition, sounds and simplicity. I was extremely proud of our performance because I never really did a piece which was so dark and challenging, I think it really opened a new flow of ideas in my brain and throughout the class, I found myself constantly thinking of new things which I think is really important. Overall, I am really enjoying this new unit because it contrasts greatly from the Storytelling unit and is extremely interesting and quite philosophical to me.

(Sorry if this is really long, it just kept flowing…)