More on Bella & Ava's duet.

 Bella and Ava's duet continued...

When creating our duet we knew that we would have to adapt our choreography, as we were over zoom, and could not incorporate choregraphic features such as physical contact or closer spatial features, that we would typically include if we were creating a duet in the studio, therefore we had to think of other features we could include in our choreography to make a cohesive and interesting duet. One of our main focuses for the content of our choreography was adding moments of stillness, whilst the other person continued dancing and vice versa. We decided to include moments of stillness as we felt these moments added a different dynamic to the choreography, they gave us the feeling that we were allowing the person that was still dancing to enjoy their movements, knowing that they had the audience's full attention. We also felt that it created an interesting visual for spectators, one side of the screen would be still whilst the other was full of fast-paced movement. When deciding when to place these moments of stillness we decided, collaboratively, that we would place the stillness in moments of our own choreography that just felt right, coincidently these happened to be at opposing timings for both of us, therefore adhering to our goal of having one person dancing whilst the other was still, before returning to doing the movement in unison.

Both of our dance spaces were very similar in colour, light, and furnishings and we enjoyed the visual harmony that this brought to our final piece. In my dance space, there is a large mirror, and some of my choreography is performed in front of this mirror. We played on this and felt that it gave the idea of a third person being in our piece, as spectators could see my reflection doing the choreography at various points in the duet. We tried to emphasise the visual of a third person being part of the choreography through the placement of the duets on the screen, Ava's recording of the duet was placed on the right side of the screen and my recording was placed on the left side and therefore my reflection, or the "third person", could be seen in the middle of the screen, instead of being lost to one of the sides.

We used the song "Starry Night" by Peggy Gou for the music for our duet, we chose this song collaboratively as we both thought it had a good strong beat that we could keep time to and liked the positive and uplifting feel of the song.

Overall I enjoyed the collaborative process with Ava, I think we worked very well together to create an effective duet.

Link to duet: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iF1PKNS2pj4Uzdv2C_ESLWEq_C5dYciS/view