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Developing Ideas- Body Dysmorphia

It has now been decided by our group that we are going to go with the idea of body dysmorphia and how it affects, people with  the mental disorder, see themselves. Personally, I think mental health is still seen as a taboo in modern society, however in recent years it has become a more talked about topic however I would still consider this a controversial topic. 

We decided that we should start by experimenting with movement, this way we would at least have something to start with. Our director also stated that we did not have to start at the beginning of our movement piece, we could come up with movement that might fit nicer somewhere else in our piece. With this advice in mind we just started to come up with ideas that could be used. Alice suggested that we use something to do with mirrors, since the disorder is based on body image and how people see themselves. I immediately had a  flashback to when I was completing the blog on space and analysing the video below. As you can see they use plastic as their main prop I thought we could use this as inspiration and maybe do the same but with mirrors. Obviously it wouldn't be as 'dancy' as we need to include all aspects of R.A.D.S but still apply this idea for our movement piece. 


With this idea, we started to experiment with our movement. We thought we would focus on relationship (between the person and the mirror which represents how they see themselves). We tried to implement the likes of unison and side-by-side type of movements from the people who were holding the mirrors. Chloe wasn't present today so we placed her as the person who had the disorder. This is what we came up with so far: 

As this is a real life issue we are basing our movement on we thought it would be a good idea to add some verbatim theatre, just to add some diversity into our piece. Also highlighting people's personal struggles on the issue, we could convey to the audience the realism of this and how many people it affects on a daily basis. With the help of our director we came across this website which had interviews of people with the illness. Here is the website:

https://www.bustle.com/articles/90659-body-dysmorphic-disorder-patients-discuss-their-feelings-about-mirrors-showing-what-its-like-to-live-with

We hope to record these interviews with our voices and play them on audio to add a realistic effect to our performance. 

We also worked on creating other parts of our performance. Our director also noted that body dysmorphia also affects not just people who think they are 'fat'. Body builders who look at themselves and see them as skinny suffer from body dysmorphia, this leads to use of steroids, excessive use of protein powders etc (also known as bigorexia). Transgender people also may suffer from body dysmorphia, not having the body of who you are meant to be. And there are many more examples. Apart form Transgender people, many of these causes of body dysmorphia boils down to social media and how it influences our own view on ourselves. We also thought it would be a good idea to place our main focus on social medias and using movements around our phones etc. 

Me and Alice also worked on a movement piece of two transgender people mirroring each other and how they wish they had each other's body parts etc. We hope to film this next lesson however it still needs more development. We mainly focused on mirroring relationships here, though we will develop this using other key words from R.A.D.S.

Next lesson I would like to focus on working and developing the mirroring movement with Alice. 
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