Wednesday 9 March 2011

Lea Anderson On Screen

As part of Nottingham Dance Festival we went to listen to a talk given by Lea Anderson on the relationship between choreography and film. She spoke about three different ways in which you can use film to create a piece of dance.

Flesh and Blood
This was the first time she had ever tried to use film as a starting point for choreography
Used Joan of Arc, the silent movie, as inspiration
Tried to remember what the film looked like in fast forward and therefore didn’t watch it back
Tried to embody something that she couldn’t completely remember, but still had a vague idea of the feeling it brought her.
Anderson didn’t play the video to any of the dancers as she wanted to commit to her imagination of what she remembered and then embody it.
Strong memory of head gestures which she conveyed in her choreography
Tried to look for a different movement vocabulary in flesh and blood, and she felt that the use of film really helped this


42nd Street
The movements that were created were taken exactly from the film. The only change was the mannerism in which the choreography was delivered.
Each dancer had to watch a particular dancer from the film and re-enact their movements
Anderson copied exact camera movements. For example, if there was a close up, only one dancer would remain on stage.
Believes that this was a “breakthrough in the idea of recycling work”
Would rather encourage dancers to try something new and observe other peoples movements as opposed to improvising.


Edits
Worked strongly with the idea of on and off stage
Found off stage choreography more difficult because of particular timings, such as taking off costumes
In this piece she was “looking for the invisible movement”
Found that the character became the costume rather than the person
Used two of the same character to create what was a mirror image of someone in a film
The three rectangles were used because the piece had to cut from close up to close up and therefore it was too difficult to emphasise that in the centre rectangle.

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