#fallandswell

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Poster for the University of Northampton Open Studio, where Fall and Swell  was performed 

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Photos from Fall and Swell, performed at the University of Northampton Open Studio on 12th December 2014

Photographs by Theresa Haworth

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A short video of footage from Fall and Swell, performed at the University of Northampton Open Studio on 12th December 2014

Filming by Tim Halliday

Edit by Hollie Rogers

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Fall and Swell

‘O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!’ John Keats

A fifteen minute work set to the score of Jane Campion’s biopic of John Keats, Bright Star, exploring physical responses to Keats' letters and poems. This work was made on first year students at the University of Northampton as part of the module Foundations in Choreography, and was presented at the University of Northampton Open Studio on 12th December 2014.

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Module Context

As a Lecturer in Dance at the University of Northampton, I regularly make work on students as part of taught curriculum and extra-curricular activities. We recently revised the Choreography strand of our degree to give further emphasis to students learning about choreography ‘from the inside’ - being involved in tutor-led choreographic processes. The first term of our first and second year choreography modules involve staff making a 15-20 minute original work on/with the students. This approach allows students to learn about choreography from within, critically engaging with and reflecting on the different tasks and decision-making processes of a choreographer.

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From September-December 2014, the DECO project gave me time and space to document and reflect on the making of the work Fall and Swell on first year students at the University of Northampton as part of the module Foundations in Choreography. Alongside our taught sessions in the studio making the work, I kept a blog on tumblr to document the process of making, and reflect on my practice. The tumblr blog therefore acts as a vehicle for documentation and reflection on my own practice, but also as a blended learning resource for students.

The blog was a form of what Schon (1983, 1987) termed ‘reflection-on-action’, which, and I quote ‘takes place when the practitioner has left the arena of venture and mentally reconstructs that arena to analyze actions and events.’ (Tembroti and Tsangaridou, 2013: 3) After each studio session I wrote a reflection on our work, which engaged with a range of the operations of the reflective practitioner outlined by Kinsella. In critically questioning my approaches to devising tasks and decision-making in the studio, for example, I was thinking about my experiences and viewing them as opportunities to learn about and make improvements to my practice and ways of working. Although my blog posts often provided description of what we did in the studio and why, discussions often returned to the contexts of the work and implications - in this case reflection and questioning of the work as a whole, and my practice generally.

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Tagging

As I posted on the blog, I ‘tagged’ each post using tumblr’s hashtagging function. This started rather haphazardly, and resulted in my ‘cleaning’ of tags once the blog was complete). As the work and blogging progressed I began to develop an index of tags to organise materials, including names of sections of the work, functions/stages of the process (devising, ideas, refinements, structuring) and type/content of posts (rehearsal notes, raw material).

The final index of tags (included below) has been significantly refined (reduced from 52 tags to 13) to reflect student comments in the questionnaires about the difficulty in engaging with a dense amount of materials. My conclusions were if the tags are too many, then they similarly provide too much content to engage with and become off-putting rather than facilitating navigation and ‘ways in’ to the materials on the blog.

Fall and Swell Tags

convulsion devising feedback humanorchestra ideas negativecapability odetoanightingale performance reflection return startingpoint structure yearning

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Student Questionnaires

As part of my evaluation of and reflection on Fall and Swell, I conducted written questionnaires asking the students to reflect on the project as a whole, their learning, and the role the tumblr blog played in this learning. Questions included those intended to generate statistics about access (how often did you access the tumblr blog? and when did you access it?) alongside more open questions including:

What did you use the blog for? If you were looking for something specific, how did you find what you were looking for? Did the blog provide you with any additional insights in to the choreographic process? If so, what specifically? In what ways has the blog contributed to your learning on the module?

A compilation of the questionnaire results can be found on the project blog here: http://decoprojectblog.tumblr.com/tagged/questionnaire, tagged questionnaire. The results fall in to two categories: tags and content.