Choreography

We were introduced to Trisha browns cube it is a mathematical problem solving approach to choreography. It consists of an imaginary cube around the persons centre position with 27 designated points around it. We wrote a detailed description of a body part e.g: left cheek or right middle finger for all the letters of the alphabet. Then we simply wrote a sentence and lined the numbers 1-27 up with the letters of the alphabet and the movement description. This then allowed me to gain a structure of movement from my sentence as the numbers gave me direction and the letter a body part.

I thought this was an excellent choreographic tool to use because by giving you a direction, it pushed you to use your brain to solve how you would get that body part to that position. I felt that it created a fine margin of what was allowed in my choreography but then by doing this it forced me to be creative and find new movements.

One down side I felt however was that it was a time consuming exorcise and when choreographing you are often up against deadlines and this method is not always suitable. Also for me personally I find that when choreographing using the cube, I struggle to remember the movement material without thorough rehearsals. I think that this is because I haven't made any decisions for my self as it has been done for me, so the movement has no relevance to me making it harder to remember.

I also wondered if this could effect the performance of some dancers who use this method,  if the movements have been predetermined by chance can a connection be made between the performer and the choreography.

    I liked the idea of pairing to performers up to both perform their sentences. It was tricky to get two sentences that fitted together, but when we did it created a really good play ground to start developing and manipulating material.