Niamh Eccleston-Tuohy BAPP

 I feel as if I haven't blogged in a while and I was unsure what to actually blog about. Instead I thought I'd briefly summarise what I've been doing and my findings. Draft Essay  Having handed in my draft essay I was very pleased to get some helpful feedback from Sam. He had given me pointers on each section of my essay which helped me see what steps I needed to take in order to improve the content. Whilst writing the draft I found it difficult to create a balance between reflective writing, personal anecdotes, reflection on ethics and academic references/theories. With what feels like a small word count I felt it impossible to equally include all of these things, however after re reading and re working through my essay slowly I'm finally managing to find some balance. I struggle when it comes to time management in the sense that I'll let something take over my whole day and keep working and working without getting anywhere helpful. I'll then be bored and exhau...

After attempting to get on with my essay recently I've felt myself putting my time an energy into that instead of blogging. To give myself a little break from writing I decided to look at the breakdown for the Diagram where I found one of the points we should include is influences on our practice. Personally I have many people who have influenced my training one way or another. Without these influences my practice would be very different or probably non existent today. I also felt it would be quite a cathartic experience to write a bit about my Mum as she was the biggest influence on my practice.  My Mum trained at the same dance school and college that I did before starting her professional career. She then moved to Brazil for two years to teach dance which inspired me greatly to travel. Through movement she was able to communicate with her pupils which I find phenomenal and links greatly to the use of multiple intelligences. She then taught at the Hammond (where both she and...

 Over the past few years I've been fortunate enough to work on the side as a chorographer. I've done a lot of work with one dance school in particular and I've learnt so much from the process of teaching the children that attend this dance school. Through teaching choreography to them whether it be for a show, audition or class I've learnt a lot about how children learn and process information.  Lens 2 focus Before I create a piece of choreography, I'm usually given a rough brief with regards to how many children I'm working with, the preferred style I should use and their ages. From there I find a suitable piece of music and start creating. The way I teach the children could be linked to Kolb's experiential learning cycle which is 'a theoretical perspective on the individual learning process that applied in all situation and areas of life'(Kolb, 2015, p.34). I will have the concrete experience of teaching them my choreography, reflect on the experie...

 As performers I feel like our bodies and body image are such huge parts of our careers, What our bodies are capable of never ceases to amaze me. The ability to belt very high notes (I wish), to imitate other people, to portray such emotion, to physically split, jump, spin, balance. As creatives we are incredible and so are our bodies however, there is a lot of negativity and stigma in our industry. There is so much I could focus on like injury prevention, how we train or our capabilities but I've decided to focus on body image as I believe it's something very relevant in this current climate.  Web 2.0 & Body Image... Web 2.0 can be very useful for creatives, especially dancers as there is a large amount of inspirational footage out there. Sometimes these perfect images and videos can lead to negative body image as anything published is usually the most perfect and best version of someone's work (which is completely understandable as the web is used for personal promoti...

 On reflecting on my practice, I've been thinking about significant times in my life where I feel like I've truly learnt/experienced something. Honestly, I feel like I'm learning new and important things everyday but there have been some more significant moments. I've been fortunate to have two Cruise ship contracts since graduating but they couldn't have been more different experiences. I learnt so much during both contracts but I've found it very interesting how I took the knowledge I gained from my first contract and applied it to my second.  For my first contract, we rehearsed in Italy for 4 weeks then flew to Japan to join the ship. The ships home port was in China, therefore all of our passengers and most of the crew were Chinese. The itinerary was phenomenal as we travelled to many different parts of Asia. On my second contract we rehearsed in Florida for a month and a half, then joined the ship which was also out of Florida and cruising around the Caribb...

 After a week of what felt like too much reading and getting stressed about the course, I decided I would take some time to watch some documentaries that may help my learning. The documentaries I watched were 'The Social Dilemma', 'My Octopus teacher' and 'Chris Packham's Animal Einstein's'.  I understand these are a very...interesting range of programmes but I can safely say I learnt so much, a lot of which contributes to areas of this course. The Social Dilemma I found The Social Dilemma incredibly interesting and shocking. I immediately felt like I wanted to get rid of my phone but that feeling was short lived as I am undoubtedly a salve to my phone and social media. I know this is something that HAS to change because our phones are controlling us and I need to take back that control.  It was crazy to see people who had essentially created all these platforms, criticising them so heavily. As one of the interviewees said, it's like we're 'u...