RESEARCH - DUALITY

The first ideas I had about creating a choreography for my third-year festival contribution surrounded the theme of duality, which came from an initial stimulus of layered photography. This idea isn't something I've necessarily researched in detail but I'm interested in exploring it as I go with my dancers. However, I want to go into my first rehearsal having a good idea of what sort of concepts surrounding this theme I want to explore, as it's such a broad topic. 

The Duality of the Mind:

This is an article that talks about the author's personal experiences surrounding the duality of the mind, I've picked a few comments/experiences that spoke to me in a choreographic sense and thought about how they apply to my creative development. He explores a positive and negative side of the self, which is not the direction I want to go in, as I don't necessarily hold the opinion that certain parts of a self can be categorised into good or bad, that feels like a very subjective scale and I don't want to place those labels on my dancers, but some of his comments were thought-provoking to explore.

This quote really spoke to me, I want to explore the dancers' senses of self and how they view themselves through a dance-focussed lens, but also the perceptions they have of each other's identities. We think of who we know ourselves to be as generally more detailed than other peoples' ideas of us as we have a lived-in understanding of ourselves, but I want to explore the complexity of how they view each other as well. There are some parts of a self that only people can see from the outside and some parts you can only see experientially.

In this passage, he talks about the 'negative' side of himself being a 'real' and 'true' state and this feeling that the positive side felt fake. This made me think of the feeling of being performatively happy outwardly to cover up how you're feeling on the inside. I am interested in exploring the internal and external sides of the self, and this passage made me think about the idea of both the internal and the external being true parts of the self. It can be true that the external self performs/puts on a front to misrepresent true emotions, but that performance/front is still a truth of the self, just another layer of the external. 

I think this text very much takes into account the sides of a self regarding emotion whereas I'm wanting to look at duality in the self through two different perceptional lenses, but it was an interesting read nonetheless. I couldn't find many things relating to this through the lens I want to explore but I'm not mad about that because I'm more interested in exploring these myself as a choreographer observing two dancers in the space.

I think I'm going to try out a written task with the dancers in our first rehearsal and focus on creating some solo material so they can get used to the idea of the self individually before we start layering their performance. It might also be a good opportunity to see what they see in each other and how I can move forward in how we explore duality in the relationship between them.

Schafer, D. (2018) The Duality of the Mind: Have you ever felt there are two sides to you? Available At: https://medium.com/@dave2742/the-duality-of-the-mind-e0515b85b499#7fb4 (Accessed: 10/03/2024)