Professional Artefact

In addition to my Critical review of my inquiry we are required to produce a professional artefact in which our community of practice could look at and understand our inquiry.

This is the Vimeo link to follow in order to view the video, https://vimeo.com/249517897 

I thought that the best way to represent my inquiry to my community of practice would be through a piece of choreography. 

My community of practice could relate to the movement showing the process from choosing my inquiry topic and the difficulty I had finding a subject I felt passionately about, I show this through use of camera focus. To then having a lot of ideas which were too broad or too off topic from my current professional practice so wouldn’t benefit me. 

The piece then goes on to show how dancers have to compete to always try to get to the front of each other in their careers, I show how some work as a team and some still try to constantly out do each other to prove their talent to show its worth something.

I then go on to portray how I used my data collection tools of surveys (all dancers face the back to remain anonymous) and how I then expanded on the answers given in my interviews. In this part of the dance I am facing the back in the interviews because the answers are kept confidential but I know who has provided them. 

The piece then moves on to the themes which came out of the surveys and interviews,

Confidence, Skill set and networking.

The piece concludes by showing how all those involved have helped to broaden my knowledge and wondering of the inquiry topic and how it has helped me to explore other avenues through influence of my community of practice, literature, SIG groups and industry professionals. 

The music I have chose by Dax Johnson - Rain, provides a constant underlying melody to dance to which isn’t over bearing, this is to show that I couldn’t let my own emotions or feelings get the better of me and the sole purpose was to gain insight from those in my community of practice.

Jumping straight in.....

I think I have made a decision to just get going with my final inquiry writing,

I am finding that the original Gant Chart i had made isn't realistically working with my work schedule and if I dont get a shift on and actually start writing my essay I am going to have a rush over the christmas holidays which noone wants!

So I am starting at the beginning and working on my introduction and the inquiry process I will conduct more interviews when I get to that section as I have shifted what my inquiry is about I need to be sure I know the aims of my inquiry before I start asking people. It's not an ideal way of doing it but unfortunately my work load is too much that I can do it in the ideal way.

Has anyone else started their inquiry in such an upside down way?

Let's Begin...

I have just read through the Module 3 Handbook for a second time, this time I was armed with post-it notes and a highlighter,

I have found the handbook to make a lot more sense by highlighting the key points I need to focus on, I had in my head that my module 3 inquiry was a huge undertaking but by reading the sections I now have a structure to my inquiry and have a starting point.

I have been thinking about my Artefact section of my inquiry and what I might do for that, this has then made me think further into my inquiry topic, as I have stated throughout my blog I have had real trouble narrowing it down into something I actually want to find out about.

After re-naming my inquiry to Why do people perform, I had 3 questions in mind;

To look at reasons that people perform other than for entertainment purposes.

What historical influences have lead to the way we perform today exploring Indian dance?

What has lead to performers feeling they need to compete their talents against each other for them to hold any worth?

Why and how do people use performing as a form of expressing themselves?

I was still feeling quite overwhelmed by these questions my main worry was apart from the main title question I was struggling on a way to link the 3 together,

I feel the first question required for more research than I had time for, the history of Indian dance is huge! It has so many meanings and reasons behind why it is performed, I only did 1 contract in India and I have no plans of going back to do another, so this wouldn't be that relevant to my professional practice.

The third question, Adesola agreed it's opening up a whole new inquiry, it could also be quite opinion based which was the reason I decided to change my inquiry in the first place.

So, I would like to focus on the second question and do my inquiry around that. I feel it is much more manageable and I would only need to analyse my findings from this, I can compare positive & negatives of competitiveness in dance rather than linking 2 completely different topics. 

perhaps looking into how competitiveness can have a positive and negative impact in professional practice and my experience of that, but now how I want to channel it in the correct way for children as a chance to show off their skills?

x

A complete U - Turn

After having the panic about starting my final inquiry and revisiting the subject after the summer break, I had really fallen out of love with it.
I felt that my inquiry question 'What does performance mean to you' was far too broad. I could explore an array of people and still not come to a conclusion. I felt as if my inquiry was all based on opinion, even reading literature would be someones opinion. This made me feel very uneasy as I had no idea how I was then going to analyse all the opinions I had gathered. I feel it would be too personal to compare one against the other, as i wouldn't have the time to completely explore peoples backgrounds and find out why they had the opinion the did and why it differed from another person.

If I hadn't made it as a performer I would have been a historian. For some this can seem worlds apart but the dance we have today all stems from somewhere. I think this is why I did not want to base my inquiry on just opinion and why I need to be able to add a factual basis which I can research. I would enjoy researching into the history of my subject.

I also think that I have had a change of heart on the inquiry topic I would like to do because I have changed what I would like to do in the future. I wanted to be a senior school teacher so I had a clear path of how I needed to get there. Over the summer I organised a dance festival. It was a 3 day competition I had 600 entries from local performers aged4-18. They competed in different genres of dance and the whole event was a great success. I am organising a 5 day one for next year in the hope I can expand each year. This is now the path I would like to take in my career. I would like to organise events & competitions for dancers. I would like to be a part of showcasing what they can do rather than teaching it to them in the first place. Although I realise my inquiry doesn't have to affect what I do in the future but I need to be able to relate it to my professional practice now, because that has now developed so too must my inquiry and I need to narrow down my question.

I am now going to as Why do people perform?
Again this can seem quite broad but I am going to narrow it down into some sub categories of
What historical influences have lead to the way we perform today exploring Indian dance.
What has lead to performers feeling they need to compete their talents against each other for them to hold any worth.

Why and how do people use performing as a form of expressing themselves. 

I am then going to focus those questions further into exploring them looking at the history of Indian dancing and the history of dance in the UK.
One of my contracts was to dance in Indian in Bollywood films & Music videos. It has become so westernised. Even when I was out there I never looked into the reason why and how it has evolved so this is of interest to me and I can use my previous experience.
I will look at the two different countries but not necessarily compare them. I would just give me moer information to look at and explore.

I am now motivated and ready to start my inquiry. I have a lot to catch up but am glad I have now finally pulled my head out the sand!

Sunday Night Panic

So as a new week begins tomorrow I am having a Sunday night panic!

I really have not gelled with my inquiry, I think that the question I have asked is broad and flakey and I wont be able to get any real analysis from it, I will just get opinions which are personal rather than any real facts I can piece together.

I will hopefully speak to Adesola about this in the hope I can completely steer my inquiry in another direction despite having done all the planning. I would really like to be excited about writing about my inquiry and raring to go, instead I am putting it off and really can't think of anything worse to do!

The reason I want to get my degree has also changed and I dont think this has helped originally it was because I wanted to work in a senior school hence why I was doing this course. Now I don't want to do that, I want to run festivals & competitions and start up my own associates dance programme. I want to build a business all around the dance world which is what I have grown up in and love & that is where my real passion is.

I guess situations change and perhaps the summer break gave me too much time and I am completely out of the swing of things.

Time to make another plan perhaps! anyone else having some Module 3 doubts?

Module 3

Ok, here we go Module 3-

Over the summer I have had my final module in the back of my mind, but still teaching full time was a challenge in itself, with exams and prepping children for festival competitions. As well as organising my own dance festival. This is something I am extremely proud of I had over 600 entries from schools across the south coast of England,  I also had some schools from further afield come to compete.
I am going to make Petersfield Dance Festival an annual dance competition getting bigger and better each year.
The first dance festival was a big learning curve for me through organisation and making sure everyone was informed as to what they needed to do. I received some great feedback about my festival.
I would like to try to use the festival in my final piece as I have seen the effect performance has on grass roots level. This is something I had not necessarily thought about in my planning. Although I will not be interviewing any of the competitors as they are minors and I don't have their permission I will write a generalised summary about what I saw that performance meant to these children. How hard they worked to achieve something extra curricular and how much passion they put in to it.
I will ask the people I am interviewing if their experiences when they were younger have effected how they now see performance.

I am now ready to focus on my final module of my BA hons and to start to do my intereviews and focus groups

Task 6C - Award Specialism Title

Award Specialism Title - BA (Hons) Professional Practice in Arts (Dance)

Since the age of 3 Dance has been my life, through every dance class as a young girl then continuing my studies at Stella Mann Dance Colege where I gained my level 6 Diploma in Professional Dance. I have then gone on to dance around the world and I have no intentions of letting my love of dance fade away.
I would like to continue my career of dancing after performing to a lot of other avenues, so I would like to keep my title quite broad on the spectrum. This will then enable me to either continue performing or go on to teaching at a higher level than I already do. I am organising a dance festival which I hope will continue to grow so there is plenty more on the horizon that I wish to discover with Dance.

For my inquiry I would like to focus on what performance means to trained and untrained individuals, and how it features in their lives.
By focusing on both trained and untrained I can gain the perspective of the fans of performance, people that have never taken to the stage but love going to support.
I can also speak to people who trained to be a performer and then didn't perform, whether it be through their own choice or not. I can also speak to people who are still peforming and then people who have perform and aren't anymore.
I would like to find out the back ground reasons for their involvement within the arts and why?