Lesson five: Gesture task

 In our fith lesson we were each tasked with making gestures, taking inspiration from our groups stimulus. I chose to make my gesture about PTSD, and the after affects war has on a person. A gesture is a movement of part of the body to express an emotion or meaning. My gesture was a simple hand movement that passes from one side of the body to the other, with the eyes following the hand at all times. 

We came back together as a group and we watched everyone’s gestures. We chose our favourite three that we thought best reflected our stimulus and were then tasked with making each gesture bigger. 

With my gesture:

1.The simple hand across the body with eyes following 

We made this bigger by adding a shake to the hand, to help symbolise the heightened sense of emotion after war.

2. The hand shaking and moving across the body with the eyes following

To make this even bigger still we decided to grab the hand that passes the body with the other, to show confusion and lack of control. 

3. Shanking hand crossing the body with other hand craving the wrist, eyes following. 

We did this for the other two gestures so we ended up with nine different movements, ranging in sizes. 

Overall the use of this gesture task enabled us to experiment with emotion and think about how the characters in our piece would be feeling. It also helped us come up with movement that can be repeated at different times through the piece to show a certain feeling. 

Here is the link to our three different gestures: https://youtu.be/xfyjN6z2tfc

Comments

  1. Lucy Athorns choreographyNovember 5, 2020 at 12:46 AM

    The layout of your blog is very appealing to the reader and I like how you have included a video to show that you have understood the task well. All of your gestures matched perfectly with your stimulus and you can see how carefully your group has thought about these. What was your initial reaction when you watched your groups gestures? Was you happy with what they came up with or would you change anything about them?

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  2. Erin TaylorNovember 7, 2020 at 12:26 AM

    Thank you for your comment Lucy! I really enjoyed seeing what they came up with. Everyone had really different ideas which was interesting to see. People had come up with things that I would never have thought of doing!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Storm IdeNovember 8, 2020 at 11:37 AM

    This is a very detailed and in-depth blog, discussing how you took a simple task and managed to create three embellished gestures from your original gesture. I also believe that you can clearly see your intension of showing the audience a moment of PTSD when watching your gesture. Was there any words in particular that initially sparked movement when it first came to creating your movement? If so, did you find using the word helpful when creating your gesture or did you find it easier to investigate PTSD as a whole?

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    Replies
    1. Erin TaylorNovember 9, 2020 at 1:15 AM

      Thank you for your comment storm! When creating my gesture, as PTSD is such a vast topic I didn’t want to focus on one word in particular, instead I decided to focus on how PTSD would make you feel or experience inclining flashbacks, nightmares and anxiety

      Delete
  4. Devanshi GanatraNovember 12, 2020 at 2:59 PM

    I admire the thought that you gave to advancing the gestures. We found that it would be easy to do the same movement in more amplitude, but you managed to sustain the original and find developments that are intricate and meaningful. Can you elaborate on the inspiration for your gesture? What is the thought process behind the hand movement, and what exactly does it mean?

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    Replies
    1. Erin TaylorNovember 15, 2020 at 12:04 AM

      Thank you for your comment devanshi! The starting point of my inspiration for my gesture was PTSD. I then wanted to focus of how PTSD would make you feel, what affects it would have on the body such as nightmares, anxiety and flashbacks. Taking inspiration from these feelings and emotions I created my hand movement. The hand movement shows the unfamiliarity of surroundings, and the anxiety of every day objects and life.

      Delete

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