For our assignment we used Meredith Monks St Petersburg Waltz for solo piano.

The piece was composed in 1994. Importantly, the piece uses two contrasting voices in the bass and treble. The left hand has a lumbering character, using heavy accents to create weight and a slow swinging feeling, whereas the right hand plays a simple melody, using large intervals and a rhythmic freedom. Their juxtaposition gives the piece a quality of escaping. The concept we decided on was inspired directly by the music: escape. The whole group had the same idea after listening to the music and we felt that we could effectively exploit the format of a quartet to portray the theme of escaping. To create our initial motifs we improvised movement, using the natural heavy swing of the music as a rhythm. We then selected movement and sequences we thought were interesting, and developed them further. An example is a large swing with the right arm, a movement we used frequently throughout the piece. We felt this suited the piece because it reflected the feel of the music and the movement itself was characteristic of our concept. Some of our material was created without the music in mind, for example our interlocking square formation. This section was created only to display our main theme of escaping and wasnt musical in its rhythm. For this type of material we then later had to develop and alter the speed and rhythm of the movement to make it follow the natural flow and accents of the music One idea that I suggested was to present movement in silence at the beginning and at the end of the piece. In this situation we could use material that was extremely effective in showing our main ideas and also movement that we found particularly interesting, without having to adapt it to have a relationship with the music. This also inadvertently created meaning at the end of the music, when the movement came to a rest, then started up again in silence. It showed the dancers had escaped from the confines of the music and were free again to continue moving. Our group worked well together. Our main strength was the number of ideas we came up with and the effective way we listened to each others offerings. This helped in singling out the ideas we had that wouldnt work and made sure the final ideas we used were certainly the most effective ones. Our main weakness was that in our discussions we came up with a plentiful range of motifs, however were not decisive enough to select a single one and to work solely on that one. Instead we spent a lot of time talking about irrelevant concepts that we eventually wouldnt use. The music held a large influence over the way in which we used our bodies. The heavy, swinging bass line was the main component in affecting the style of movement we produced. The juxtaposition of the constant drone and of the erratic melody was significant when deciding how each of the four dancers would relate to each other. For example, in our interlocked square formation, the moment where Fiona leans out of the formation, suspended by the rest of the group, is directly inspired by relationship between the treble and the bass in the music. The music produced a tense atmosphere throughout, and we wanted to keep this ambiance constant in the silent passages. To create this feeling of anxiety we used a lot of eye contact between the dancers, sometimes changing abruptly and sometimes very slowly. Another of the musics qualities was its mournful tone, which we interpreted by performing the piece with very little projection beyond the stage, minimising any connection to the audience. This inward-looking manner of dancing was effective in reflecting the musics quiet, sombre quality. Dance phrase is the way in which movements are linked together. Phrases can be created to fit music precisely, to increase in tension to reach a climax, to evoke a range of emotions, etc. The ordering of movements and the flow between them is very important in keeping the dances meaning consistent with what the choreographer wishes to show. One recent performance I participated in was Balanchines Serenade. This piece uses a very direct relationship between movement and music. Along with specific nuances in the music reflecting directly into the quality of movement, the structure of the piece replicates the structure of the music in a very formal way. For example, the opening tableau uses an overwhelmingly emotional theme on a full string orchestra. On stage, a vast corps de ballet of women in atmospheric blue lighting create simple yet strikingly meaningful gestures in exact unison. The phrasing of the movement follows the phrasing of the theme exactly. A contrasting piece I have viewed in rehearsal is KT Nelsons Transit, where an electronic score accompanies two dancers producing very pedestrian movements, exaggerated for effect. Here there is no particular relationship between the rhythm of the movement and the rhythm of the music, and there is no obvious structure in the score to reflect in the choreography. Instead the repetitive sound of the music is used to reproduce the feeling of the monotony of urban transport and day to day life.