Initial idea / stimulus

 For my independent solo choreography I’m going to be performing a piece that is very close to myself and my family. My solo will be about my great grandad who when he was in World War II got stranded at sea in a tiny dinghy for eleven days, after further research I found that this happened so much during the wars and discovered a diary entry which went into great detail about what life was like for them stranded at sea. (Reynolds, 2016) On the eleventh day they were rescued and all six of them survived, this story is so inspiring to me and makes me so proud to be his great granddaughter and performing this piece would allow me to convey his story as well as portray what they all went through during this time.

(Wordpress, 2016)                                          

                                       

I have attached a variety of different images from different wars where the men were stranded at sea.

     (Pittard, n.d.)

(BBC, 2016)

When performing my choreography I want the audience to be able to understand the story as well as learn something new, because there are so many more factors to this story that I didn’t know myself until researching and looking into it. I also feel it will have quite an emotional impact on myself and the audience as it such a moving story and it's very personal to me.

 

For this piece, I have and will continue to do a lot of research, a big section of my choreography as well as research is based on a diary that was recorded by flight officer, Eric Hartley, who when the men were stranded recorded what happened each day and what they had to go through (Reynolds, 2016), which then leads me into thinking of prop ideas and different sections to this piece. As well as, thinking about the emotional side of it and capturing in my performance how the men were feeling and the desperation they had to be rescued.

 

I have taken inspiration from Crystal Pite’s piece ‘Revisor’ (Saddler's Wells Theatre, 2019) which is a piece where the dancers act out movements and for each word of a passage or sentence, they perform a movement which can vary as it could be a small or big movement depending on the word. After watching this piece,I thought it would work really well with the diary section of my piece and it is a really exciting yet challenging choreographic process for me to use while creating my solo. 

References 

BBC, 2016. Pants for fishing nets: How stranded WW2 crew survived. [image] Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-35911549> [Accessed 11 October 2021].

Pittard, B., n.d. The National WWII Museum | A Salute to Freedom. [image] Available at: <https://salutetofreedom.org> [Accessed 11 October 2021].

Reynolds, M., 2016. Stranded heroes survived 11 days at sea using pants to catch fish, lost WW2 diary reveals. [online] Express.co.uk. Available at: <https://pulse.express.co.uk/news/history/653531/Eric-Hartley-forgotten-diary-world-war-two-soldiers-shot-down-survived-fish-pants> [Accessed 9 October 2021].

Saddler's Wells Theatre, 2019. Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young / Kidd Pivot - Revisor - Trailer. [video] Available at: <https://youtu.be/1aNVbdPh-pk> [Accessed 9 October 2021].

Wordpress, 2016. Unbroken. [image] Available at: <https://samfiske1.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/put-together-in-one/> [Accessed 11 October 2021].