Chance Method
Blog 4: Chance Method
The presence of my solo within our piece is to capture the moment that the plane crashed into the tower and Marcy Borders emotions and experience. I have thought about the 5 senses and what I feel the atmosphere would be like at the time to try and portray the even as accurate as possible. I found that, from never having any personal experience of this, research was key for me to understand.
I found an article that includes Janice Brooks first-hand experience who escaped from the 84th floor of the World Trade Centre. She said to hear a “loud bang” and a gentleman bellowing for everyone to leave. At the time of her exiting towards the corridor, among others, everything seemed partially normal until she accounted “there was this loud crashing sound. Lights fell down and dust and chunks of the ceiling were all over the place”. At this point, the stairway had been demolished. “There was just dust, darkness and some flickering of flames. Then there was this almighty screaming sound, a woman screaming the scream of nightmares, a scream that I can still hear in my head” is a sentence in the article that I feel is important, a scene that I can only imagine how terrifying it would’ve been, trapped in the tower, but one that helped me to find the true depictions within my solo. Brooks continues to inform the readers of a woman, who had emerged with hair full of glass and one foot with most of her toes severed, alongside a man with glass puncturing his chest. With her shirt stained with blood and a “scream building inside” of her, Brooks with a group of people eventually escaped out onto the frenzied street. Another quote that I feel I should embody into my solo choreography is, “I looked up at the World Trade Centre, and where our floor should have been there was a gaping hole. I just stood there and cried”. This feeling must be so heavy and destroying yet opposing with a sense of relief that she had made it out alive. (9/11 anniversary: 'It was like hell was opening up' - how I escaped from the 84th floor of the south tower, 2021)
After reading the story of Janice Brooks, I felt that I had better insight into what had happened, and it inspired me with methods and emotions to use in my choreography. First, I began by rippling through my body to a lower level to show the impact of the building being hit, this led me into rippling through my spine with a shaking motion to add a fast ‘breath’ that usually occurs when a person feels anxious. This directed me into a group of movements in an expansive reaching motion that then compressed into a contracted position to expand up and deflate back down again. This section is on the themes of breath as I feel when you panic, you are usually told to breathe to keep calm.
I decided to take 3 words that Janice Brooks had used to describe her personal experience, as I feel that Borders would’ve felt much the same, then came up with a movement for each of these words to use within my solo. The words I chose include dust, nightmare and frenzied as I feel these have the most connection to what I am representing. For ‘dust’ I decided that I needed to use a movement that was light and floaty to represent dust particles moving within the air. I also thought about how this would affect a person, it would be rather suffocating to be surrounded by the particles. For ‘nightmare’ I used an isolated and uneasy movement that felt slightly ugly and uncomfortable to exemplify the sentiments surrounded with this word. For ‘frenzied’, an erratic movement felt best suited that almost has no control to fully showcase the chaos that unfolded as the plane crashed into the World Trade Centre. I liked using this method to choreograph as it had allowed me to focus on small aspects of the intention behind my solo to be able to tell the story I want to without being overwhelmed with a large topic and then not completing my choreography with the appropriate purpose.
Aspects I struggled with include the typical battles of working from home. Without adequate space, I was unable to be as expansive and exploratory with my movement as I could’ve been within a studio. As well, lacking mirrors, I couldn’t see if what I was doing worked well and had to trust how it felt in my body as to whether I liked it or not. In some ways, this is a positive as I couldn’t focus on the aesthetic of my movement and instead must trust the way it felt to move as I did look correct and linked well. Unfortunately, with still being absent due to medical reasons, it’s something I have had to work through.
Sky News. 2021. 9/11 anniversary: 'It was like hell was opening up' - how I escaped from the 84th floor of the south tower. [online] Available at: <https://news.sky.com/story/9-11-anniversary-it-was-like-hell-was-opening-up-how-i-escaped-from-the-84th-floor-of-the-south-tower-12402005> [Accessed 19 November 2021].
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