Alys Davies BAPP Blog

    Picture: Taylor Wright via unsplash.com ‘We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.  All art is quite useless’ – Oscar Wilde, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’     Whilst trying to refine my inquiry topic, and consequently trying to understand the dance world’s attitude towards money and personal finance, I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the reason artists shy away from talking about money and why dance schools fail to educate dancers on it (at least in my experience), is because we feel our work is not important.    Back in Module 1, I wrote a blog discussing the skills dancers possess, how they are acquired within the dance world and their transferability to other fields of employment. This was partly in response to the Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s comments implying that the arts were an unviable profession and that artists should r...

                                    Photo: Micheile Henderson via unsplash.com As part of my diagram in Module 1, I identified ethical considerations within my practice. One such consideration that stuck out to me was the issue of personal finance. Within my diagram I referenced an article by Lyndsey Winship that discussed how Covid-19 had catastrophically affected freelance dancers.    It occurred to me that this article was one of the few instances in which I had seen any real discussion of the financial reality of being a professional freelance dancer, especially in times of crisis. It made me wonder why it has taken a global pandemic for the difficulties dancers face in this area to gain national attention. Within British society in general, discussing money is relatively taboo, and it seems to me that this trend is even more extreme within the dance sector. The combination of stiff c...

Starting Module 2 is exciting; however I can’t shake the feeling of being slightly overwhelmed. This feeling is remarkably similar to the one I had at the beginning of Module 1, albeit with less anxiety over how to use MyUniHub.    Module 1 feels like a lifetime away, and whilst I am ecstatic that Module 2 is very different, it does leave me with a feeling that I am starting all over again, just from a different place.    I attended the Welcome Back Zoom on Friday 5 th  February, which provided some interesting insight. I have a potential idea for an area of my practice that I would like to research, however I am trying not to become too attached in case it turns out to be irrelevant or fruitless.    Despite all of this, I am hungry to learn more and challenge myself throughout this module, and to do work that is more research based as opposed to reflexive, whilst staying true to my practice and building on the foundation I built in Module 1.  ...

On Monday 16 th  November 2020 I attended the Module 1 discussion group centred around ‘Synthesis of Information through Reflection’.  Multiple topics and ideas were discussed but several in particular resonated with me.    Adesola (who was leading this session), made the excellent point about how all the ‘data’ we have collected throughout this module relevant to our practice is malleable. There is always the opportunity to use the data to express one particular idea whilst also expressing another. I feel this ties in excellently with another point made during the session, namely that our presentation of our practice does not have to be one solid ‘shape’, but can continually change and be open to adaptation. The concept of not separating dance (or our art form) from academia was also mentioned which I believe follows on from this, since I have had personal experience with struggling to make my wide and varied practice ‘fit’ into a narrow academic box. In my opi...

I recently handed in my drafts of my Reflective Essay and Diagram for Module ACI3611. This whole process made me question what the term ‘draft’ really entails and how it can relate to me and my practice.    The Cambridge Dictionary defines a draft as:  ‘a  piece  of  text , a  formal   suggestion , or a  drawing  in  its   original   state , often  containing  the  main   ideas  and  intentions  but not the  developed   form ’   Sticking to this definition, what I handed in cannot really be qualified as a ‘draft’ since the ideas were developed and the pieces were vastly different from how I originally wrote them. But then again, we often distinguish between first, second, third drafts and so on. At what point does a draft cease to be a draft and become a ‘finished’ piece of work?    If we look at this in terms of the dance world, and thus my practice, all pieces o...

During this entire research period I have been trying to analyse every aspect of my practice and where it comes from. However, there’s one aspect that I have always tried to ignore, partly out of embarrassment, partly out of fear of judgement, and partly because of a feeling that it was not relevant. But it is exceptionally relevant, because the management of it is imperative for me to practice efficiently and to the best of my ability. This ‘aspect’ is that I suffer from depression and anxiety and have done for several years.    It sounds almost paradoxical that I can be doing what I have always dreamed of doing (i.e. dancing professionally), yet I can still have depression and feel as if my life is without hope nor purpose. But that is because it is an illness that affects your brain chemistry, not a logical stream of thought following the positive and negative pathways of your life. Moreover, within the dance community, despite positive steps being taken in the last few yea...

On Wednesday 14 th  October I took part in a ‘Talking about Writing’ workshop with Peter Thomas. I was keen to attend this meeting since although writing comes relatively naturally to me, I wanted to find areas upon which I could improve and was curious to hear other people’s viewpoints. I noticed that in many areas discussed, there was a large correlation between the writing process and the choreographic process, alongside general dance practice.    We started the session with a freewriting activity. The aim of freewriting is somewhat self-explanatory. You aim to write for a certain amount of time (in our case it was five minutes), without stopping, re-reading, correcting or judging. I found this exercise rather daunting since I often struggle with self-judgement and I feel anxious when I can’t check what I have written as I feel I have the tendency to go off topic whilst writing freely. This self-criticism is mirrored in my professional dance practice, and it struck me ...