Lesson Nine: Inspiration

In this blog I will be discussing some choreographic influences that have inspired my work. I will be talking about the choreographic intent, the impact on the audience, and I will also be comparing how they have influenced our ways of moving. The two pieces I am going to look at are ‘Young Men’ by BalletBoyz and ‘Sutra’ by Sidi larbi. 


‘Young men’ by BalletBoyz is a piece devised by Ivan Perez to show a group of men brought together by how brutal and hard war was. They all struggle to maintain their humanity in a never ending cycle of war and death. Through the production they are pushed to their limits. The power and agility of their movements while expression emotions such as fear is something we were really inspired by and wanted to incorporate into our piece. You can really see intention behind each of their movements and we really tried to implement this when choreographing. We made sure we discussed the intentions behind our movements, why are we throwing the arm? Why are we looking up? By asking ourselves these questions we were able to put more passion behind each of our movements as we knew we were doing them for a reason. 

The emotion portrayed in Young Men was also something we were hugely inspired by. The raw feelings made it really hard to watch as they felt so real. The use of such intense emoting really made us empathise with certain characters. This is something we would love our audience to feel. We want them to travel through the story with us, experiencing the same emotions. After watching Young Men it really made me realise how powerful acting can be and if we implemented lots of acting into our piece it could makes such a difference to the way a piece is received by an audience. 


‘Sutra’ by Sidi larbi is a piece performed by monks from the Shaolin temple. They use wooden boxes that transform into different things through the piece such as a wall, bridge and a temple. They also use long sticks as props. Just like we are using in our piece. There is a section in the piece where it looks like two of the monks are fighting. They use the sticks as a way of implementing contact work into the piece. The unique and intricate way of moving with such a big prop is something we were really inspired by and learned from. Many of our movements with the sticks were created after being inspired by this piece. Using a long stick in our piece was always a risk as using them effectively was a challenge. We didn’t want them to look like they were a filler and weren’t there for a reason. The way they control the props on stage was also something we took notice off. They used them in as many ways as they could, taking full advantage of the fact that they were there. 


Overall Young men by balletboyz helped to inspire our emotional side of our piece, the intention behind our movements whereas Sutra by Sidi larbi helped inspire us in the way we created movement and the way we handled our props. 


‘Young men’ Ballet 

Boyz https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04g0b9t 


‘Sutra’ Sidi Larbi https://youtu.be/JNHMrSh4XB4

Comments

  1. Devanshi GanatraNovember 19, 2020 at 2:55 PM

    It has been interesting to read your post and continue to develop an understanding of your choreographic choices. You managed to extract some very good aspects of these works, and I can see how they have strengthened yours! It seems that 'Sutra' is quite different to your piece. Once you had been inspired by the use of props, did the movements change to fit your theme more closely?

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    Replies
    1. Erin TaylorNovember 20, 2020 at 1:25 AM

      Thank you for your comment devanshi! Being inspired by the use of props in sutra definitely helped us to create intricate movements with our sticks that suited the theme of war. They used lots of contact work with their sticks and we decided to have a go at incorporating some of this into our piece, to help make proper use of our props.

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  2. Lucy Athorns choreographyNovember 25, 2020 at 11:35 AM

    You have described both Ballet Boyz and Sidi Larbi expressive movement style clearly. With 'Young Men' by Ballet Boyz, you mentioned how you were influenced by the acting and how it can emotionally capture the audiences attention really well. I like how you have paid special attention on the acting side because your stimulus is such a poignant reminder of what some people our age went through. You have expanded this idea well into your choreography well done.

    Even though you said that Sadi Larbi helped you create movement and Ballet Boyz inspired your emotional side of the piece, were there any factors of Ballet Boys choreographic process that have inspired you in particular, are there any methods that they use?

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    Replies
    1. Erin TaylorNovember 25, 2020 at 12:43 PM

      Thank you for your comment lucy! During my research I wasn’t able to find anything about the choreographic process that went into creating ‘Young men’ but when choreographing they focused on the men as a whole and the energy that they could create. This inspired us as my group wanted to move as one, creating high energy and powerful motifs.

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  3. Storm IdeNovember 29, 2020 at 4:02 AM

    This is an excellent blog which clearly describes the differing styles of these inspirations and how they drove you to use them throughout your creative process. I loved discovering how you decided to use props in your piece and how they had such a personal connection to 'Sutra'. You mentioned that Ballet Boyz not only inspired your movement, yet had a huge impact on the emotions of your piece. How will you personally project the idea of intense raw emotions onto your viewing audience, keeping Ballet Boyz in mind for inspiration?

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    Replies
    1. Erin TaylorDecember 1, 2020 at 11:55 PM

      Thank you for your comment storm! My group have had many discussions about how we want to portray our characters and what emotions work best. We decided that we wanted to show individually so we worked on enhancing our characters at home. For myself I will project the idea of raw emotions by imagination. When dancing I hope to imagine how the soldiers would really be feeling seconds before going into war and channeling that. This should hopefully portray an intense but real sense of emotion.

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