This page shows the research I have done while being at Ohio State. It showcases my work beyond movement and gets more technical with vocalizing my in depth findings on different topics.
One Hour Research Study
A Study of the Subconscious Mind
I did a study on the subconscious mannerisms of people in order to grasp the little things that people do to influence choreography. The purpose of this project was to explore a different approach to how choreographers come up with choreography. When it comes to being a choreographer, I have many times come across the problem of a movement block where I get stuck. The research I conducted is research with creative exploration. I began my study by going to the Thompson Library. Here, I spent an hour going between floors and the café, studying as many people as I could. I looked for people distracted by something else such as eating, homework or talking to a friend. While observing, I payed attention to the movements these people did subconsciously. For example, tapping of a pencil, shaking their leg, scratching their head, etc. I recorded these movements and took my data to the dance studio. Here, I came up with dance movements derived from the subconscious actions. I then asked a fellow dancer to be a part of a dance film that included these dance movements. By exploring the unconscious mind, I planned to come up with raw movement that were not forced and more natural in the body. I expected to see this movement come across in my dance film that way when people watch it they felt this movement in their own bodies because it is something so familiar. After I conducted this research I found that I did just that. Although this was a time consuming way to come up with choreography I do not think I would have ever thought of this type of movement if I did not go to these measures. I also learned that my intentional significance of doing this captured exactly what I had hoped; to explore different ways to move and choreograph. It bridges a gap between dancers and non-dancers by studying non-dancers and turning that information into movement for dancers. It brought new knowledge into the dance field by showing choreographers that there are ways to observe and study things outside of the artist bubble in order to come up with raw movement that others can feel a connection to. This showed me that I would love to continue my research with choreography as well as dance film. This research also showed me that my love for the little things not only lies in the dance world but in everyone’s body.
One Hour Study Dance Film
Research of Non-Dance Movement
An Analysis of video Gaming and Translation into a Motif
With my new understanding of analysis I did research on the non-dance movement of video gaming. After observing this activity for 10 minutes and taking notes of the body's movements, I drew the score you see to the right that would help me remember the pathways of his body.
From here I translated and categorized his movements into body, space design and effort analysis concepts. I highlighted those concepts to help show my understanding of Laban movements. You can see my notations and my research of these concepts in the DOCX below.
Original Score
To conclude my research I converted my findings into a Motif Score. After gaining the knowledge of how to create a motif score, I compared the original score to my motif score. I then expressed the problems I have with motif scores.
In my opinion, writing a motif score is hard for me to do just stemming from the fact that there is such a broad thinking when it comes to motif scores. However, doing this from how I originally interpreted my movement was not as challenging. When I wrote down the movement originally, I went back and forth between stick figures with very little words and labanotation symbols. The stick figures set me up to easily isolate a specific body movement and translate that to eventually have symbols for every movement that I drew about. Already having the symbols helped me figure out what I should write for my motif score because although we have learned more advanced symbols and ways to interpret these, this set me up for success while interpreting them into a motif.
I believe that the way to look at motif scores is by breaking down movement. If I were trying to translate a turn, looking at each body parts’ movement in the one turn individually, I would look first at the pathway of the head, right arm, left arm, torso, and then each leg. Breaking down one movement into different sections, depending on what the motion one body part is doing, is how I go about translating movement into a motif score.
The main problem with the system of the motif score is that there are so many different ways to interpret something and it can become super tedious. Because of motif scores being so tedious it can become complicated to translate movement and make sure you interoperate every movement. Also, with it being so broad it can cause controversy over what the motif score is saying to do. How I interpret something may not be the same as how someone else might interpret something so it can become complicated to give your score to someone else and have them translate it back to movement and have it be the same thing.
