© Commonwealth of Australia 2009 Stimulus ideas for dance composition

stimulus ideas for dance composition

stimulus is defined as the starting point or incentive for creative movement. Stimuli can be categorised into 5 groups.

stimulus VISUAL AUDITORY KINAESTHETIC IDEATIONAL TACTILE what we see what we hear movement what we touch ideas

IDEATIONAL

ideas The following images and poems suggest concepts and ideas that could be used to stimulate ideas for dance composition. Click in the text box on each page to add your ideas about the concept that could be used for dance composition. You could write random ideas or develop a short narrative. Consider how the concepts could be translated to dynamic qualities, timing, spatial floor patterns, body shapes, relationships and other aspects of dance composition. narratives poems concepts quotes

Double click to add your ideas

Choreographers such as Martha Graham and Nacho Duato have used poetry as stimulus for some of their works. Use the highlight text tool to select lines from the following poems that could be used as a starting point for movement. Write your movement ideas next to the text. Words and rhythms of poems can inspire dramatic shapes and relationships

There's a certain slant of light, On winter afternoons That oppresses, like the weight Of cathedral tunes. Heavenly hurt it gives us; We can find no scar, But internal difference Where the meanings, are. None may teach it anything, 'T is the seal, despair, An imperial affliction Sent us of the air. When it comes, the landscape listens, Shadows hold their breath; When it goes, 't is like the distance On the look of death. There's a certain slant of light by Emily Dickinson Double click to add your ideas Source

Source Pain has an element of blank; It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A day when it was not. It has no future but itself, Its infinite realms contain Its past, enlightened to perceive New periods of pain Pain has an element of blank by Emily Dickinson Double click to add your ideas

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Sonnet CXVI by William Shakespeare Source Double click to add your ideas

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches;Without any companion it grew there, uttering joyous leaves of dark green,And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself; But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves, standing alone there, without its friend, its lover near for I knew I could not;And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss, And brought it away - and I have placed it in sight in my room;It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them;)Yet it remains to me a curious token--it makes me think of manly love; For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana, solitary, in a wide flat space,Uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a lover, near,I know very well I could not. I Saw In Louisiana A Live Oak Growing by Walt Whitman Source Double click to add your ideas

© Commonwealth of Australia 2009 Stimulus ideas for dance composition