Horizons

Within the first year of Rubicon, the first years and I were tasked with creating solos based off of a sculpture of our choosing by Sir Antony Gormely, a famous British artist. All four of us created at least a minute and a half of material, taking inspiration from our chosen artwork. As my ideas and thought process changed, so did my choice of sculptures. In the beginning, the sculptures I chose were Pose ||, Strike, Front, Exposure, and White Cubes : In Formation. Although they weren't the main sculptures for my finished solo, I still took inspiration from their shapes. But the sculptures I took most inspiration from and credited as such were Small Blockworks and Run ||. After performing our solos, we were then informed that we would use the movement material that we had all created to give us inspiration and aid us in the creative process of our group piece. But at the beginning of the creative process, we all realised that all of our sculptures had a common element, a theme. They were all looking towards something, whether that was internally or externally changed, varying from one to another, and when we were told who our audience would be, it helped us decide on a narrative. Our audience was set to be a primary school, specifically years five and six. With this in mind, we started thinking of ideas and in the end chose one of mine, that being that we were looking towards a new horizon, a new beginning, relating it back to the primary school students as most of them would be leaving to move onto high school—their new beginning. Throughout the next couple of months, all four of us worked together within sessions, creating new material and dwindling the number of musical score options we had. Some sessions we got a lot done, creating a completely new section of the dance, and other sessions we were focusing and going slow, either for health and safety reasons when we were doing lifts or for our own peace of mind if we got confused. While working on this project, we were also thinking about what costumes we could wear, wondering if we should choose colourful pieces or neutral pieces, dresses or trousers. In the end, we decided on a black and white colour theme, with two wearing white and two wearing black. This was mainly to not take the focus away from the dance itself and also relate to the type of material that Gormely uses: concrete, iron, and clay. When it came to dresses and trousers, that mainly came down to personal preferences, which resulted again in a half-and-half split, with two wearing dresses and two wearing trousers. With the day of the performance getting closer, we were told that because of COVID, the primary school students were unable to attend and instead performed for the second-year students and staff at Rubicon, who were able to attend and watch digitally in order to respect social distancing rules and regulations. The piece was five minutes long, going from a contact improvisation at the beginning to duets, lifts, and solo sections from our original materials, and we were able to keep everyone's attention on us. We were told by the head of vocational training at the time, Paul Davis, that we really impressed him, and with the second year's approval, we were given the opportunity to further develop the piece in order to perform it at the end-of-year show, ‘Perceptions 2021’. And as of right now, our creation is being used as an example to show those both creating and evaluating within the unit. Music credits - 'Dance For Me Wallis' by Abel Korzeniowski (Edited to match length of dance)