Lost in Translation

In our second lesson for choreography we were put in to our groups for the choreography and studied a technique called Lost in translation where we got in to three lines of six and everyone but the front person of the line turned around to face the back of the room. Then the first person in the line created an 8 count sequence and one by one a person would turn around looking and memorising the phrase until it reached the sixth person. Majority of the sequences made ended up with movements missing or with complete opposite actions. Personally I felt that I retained most of the sequences as they were shown to me, however when a turn or a quick change of direction occurred I found it difficult to maintain the correct movements in the short amount of time shown to me. Here below is a video of the person on the right performing the original choreography compared to the developed and memorised choreography. As a class we looked at Chapter 4 of Kate Flatt’s Choreography: Creating and Developing Dance for Performance (Flatt, 2019) where it talks about a variation of ways you can stage a performance and the use of off stage and on. A key point of the chapter we looked at was the techniques of direction and how a movement can look different from a different angle. The directions are named by letters from A-H. We then discussed as a class about how the different directions made us feel, for example G was a photo of a man facing towards the left back corner of the room and most of my peer’s agreed that it created an isolated atmosphere. Later on in this session we were given a task to use the Lost in translation technique to create a phrase to potentially use in our final piece. We used the choreography created from the Lost in translation task and used the original choreography alongside the passed on final product. We started off by writing down whose sequence would go in an order and whether it would be their original choreography or the developed version. We split the group in half to have one half perform the original choreography and the other half performs the changed choreography, or it may be that one half completes my section and the other half performs another peer’s sequence. We incorporated the direction technique by creating a circle and facing opposite directions whilst completed the sequence. Flatt, K., 2019. Choreography : Creating and Developing Dance for Performance. The Crowood Press.