🎬 Within Her Eyes — 6f.1
Stimulus, Intent & Approach
Where the work came from · What James Cousins wanted to say · How he and the dancers built it
📚 What you'll learn on this page
- What inspired Within Her Eyes — the stimulus behind the work
- What James Cousins wanted the audience to feel — his choreographic intention
- How the work was made — the collaborative, improvised choreographic approach
- How to use DLIE (Describe · Link · Interpret · Evaluate) to structure a great Section C answer
6f.1.1 The Stimulus
A love story — with a twist
The spark that started it all.
Every piece of choreography begins with a stimulus. For Within Her Eyes, James Cousins built his around a love story with a twist. Tap the steps below to unpack what that actually means.
1
Cousins's starting point
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Cousins was inspired by his own personal experiences and by well-known love stories — the familiar ones where two people meet, hit bumps in the road, and in the end find a way to be together.
2
What he flipped
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He wanted to flip that shape around. In his version, no matter what the two characters feel for each other, no matter how tenderly they hold on, ultimately they could never be together. That's the twist.
3
The three theme pairings
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The whole piece rests on three pairs of opposites that pull against each other throughout: love & loss, dependency & loyalty, and longing & memory.
Conventional love story
Boy and girl meet. Things go wrong. They fight for their love. In the end — despite the bumpy road — they're together.
vs
The twist
The two characters clearly love each other. But from the very start, the audience senses that, no matter what they do, they cannot end up together.
Love & loss
Dependency & loyalty
Longing & memory
Did you know?
Within Her Eyes is actually a film version of an earlier stage piece Cousins made in 2012 called There We Have Been. The stimulus, intention and physical rule (female dancer off the floor) all carry over from the stage show — but the film lets the audience get much closer to the emotion.
Examiner's Eye — use this exact phrase
If an exam question asks about the stimulus, write: "The stimulus for Within Her Eyes was a love story with a twist, inspired by personal experiences and well-known narratives, exploring themes of love and loss, dependency and loyalty, longing and memory." That single sentence covers everything the mark scheme is looking for.
6f.1.2 Choreographic Intent
An abstract tragic love story, open for interpretation
What Cousins wanted the audience to feel.
The choreographic intention is what Cousins set out to communicate. His intent is often written like this — tap each highlighted word to unpack what it actually means:
"To portray an abstract tragic love story that is open for interpretation."
📐 Abstract
Not a realistic story with named characters, dates and places. Instead, it deals with feelings and ideas — grief, love, longing — in a stylised way. The dancers aren't pretending to be specific people in a specific room; they're embodying emotions you can recognise from your own life.
💔 Tragic
It's a love story, but the audience can sense from the start that it cannot end happily. There's no villain to fight and no obstacle to overcome — the sadness is already baked in. That's what makes it tragic rather than just sad.
🎭 Open for interpretation
Cousins deliberately does not tell you exactly what's happening. Is the woman a ghost? A memory? Is the man real, or is he in her head? You're meant to bring your own reading — and any honest, well-supported interpretation is valid.
He also wanted the film to carry the same emotional intensity and visceral energy as the live stage show There We Have Been — but in ways only film could achieve.
Tap each intention below to see how Cousins achieved it in the finished film.
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Emotional intensity
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Achieved by complete physical contact between the dancers for the entire duet — the two bodies are totally dependent on each other, never pulling fully apart.
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Female off the floor
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The female dancer never once touches the floor throughout the entire 17 minutes. This one rule creates a completely unique movement vocabulary and gives her an otherworldly, ungrounded quality.
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The pull between two loves
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The female dancer constantly reaches, wraps, balances and falls on and around the male. She folds in to him, then pulls away — showing the tension between her new feelings for him and her pull towards a lost love.
🤝
A devoted male response
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The male dancer never initiates — he only responds. He is always there to catch her, lift her, support her. He needs her just as much as she needs him.
🌫️
Tender, sombre mood
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Achieved through the slow, careful dynamics, the overcast Welsh landscape, the muted natural light, and the delicate piano-and-strings score. Every element pulls in the same emotional direction.
🎭
Open for interpretation
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Cousins deliberately leaves the ending ambiguous — his favourite shot is the final one, because we never find out whether she touches the ground. You, the audience, decide.
I hope people almost forget about the physicality and just connect to these two people and their story. At the heart of it is a love story.— James Cousins, choreographer (AQA interview, paraphrased)
6f.1.3 Choreographic Approach
How the work was actually made
The process — from a single rule to a 17-minute film.
Cousins's choreographic approach was built on two starting points. Tap each anchor to see what it meant for the creation of the work.
Anchor 1
The narrative
Emotional themes
Cousins had a clear emotional story in mind before he ever stepped into the studio: love and loss, dependency and loyalty, longing and memory.
Every improvisation, every rule, every edit served that story.
Anchor 2
The physical rule
Lisa off the floor
One specific restriction: the female dancer, Lisa, must never touch the floor.
It sounds like a limitation. For Cousins it was the opposite — a clear boundary that forced a brand new movement vocabulary to be invented.
From those two anchors, most of the material was made through improvisation with the dancers, filmed, watched back, and pieced together. Here's the full process step by step:
1. Start with two anchors
Cousins began with a clear sense of the narrative (love, loss, longing) and one physical rule (Lisa off the floor). Everything else would be discovered.
2. Play, research, improvise
He and the two dancers spent around a week and a half exploring — trying things out, responding to prompts, and pushing the material into more unusual places.
3. Film everything
All the improvisations were filmed, then watched back. Cousins selected the moments that felt right, and tweaked tasks to push the material further.
4. Build from short sections
They started thinking a 10-minute duet was the maximum Lisa could handle off the floor. Gradually they stretched it — 12 minutes, then 15, eventually the full 17.
5. Structure to the narrative arc
Cousins pieced the segments together into a shape that followed the developing relationship — one continuous emotional journey.
6. Translate to film with Scratch
For the 2016 film, Cousins worked closely with the director and director of photography from dance-film company Scratch to translate the stage choreography into an outdoor film shot in Welsh landscapes.
Action words as rules
Cousins gave the dancers specific action words as rules for sections of the piece. At the start, Lisa was told "do not face Aron" — creating the feeling of distance and detachment. Later, he introduced the idea of spirals — giving the movement a much more intimate, intertwined feeling. These small rules are how the relationship is built without a traditional movement motif.
No repeating motif — why?
Most dances have a short movement phrase (a motif) that comes back again and again. Within Her Eyes doesn't — because keeping Lisa off the floor is so physically specific that the movement has to keep flowing forward. Cousins has said that the continuous journey itself becomes the motif — the dancers are always moving, always changing, always progressing.
6f.1.4 DLIE Explained
The four-step structure for top-band answers
Describe · Link · Interpret · Evaluate.
To score in the top mark bands in Section C, your answers need to do more than just describe what you see. You need to link it to the choreographer's intent, interpret what it could mean, and evaluate its impact on the audience.
DLIE is a four-step structure that makes sure you cover all four. Tap through the steps below to see how one production feature — the female dancer never touching the floor — can be built into a full answer.
Example feature: The female dancer never touches the floor throughout the entire 17-minute film.
Examiner's Eye — starter phrases
Keep these in your back pocket: Describe — "In this section…" · Link — "This connects to Cousins's intention to…" · Interpret — "This could suggest…" or "In my opinion…" · Evaluate — "This is effective because…" or "This creates impact because…"
6f.1.5 💜 Your Response
💜 What does this mean to you?
Cousins wanted the work to be open for interpretation — that means your response matters. There are no wrong answers here. Take a minute to jot down what the stimulus, intent and approach spark for you.
Prompt 1 — The twist
The stimulus was "a love story with a twist." What does that phrase make you think of, before you even watch the film?
Prompt 2 — The rule
Cousins built the whole piece around one physical rule: the female dancer never touches the floor. What does that rule make you imagine about her character, even before you see her move?
Prompt 3 — Open for interpretation
Cousins wants you to form your own interpretation. If you had to sum up what Within Her Eyes might be about in one sentence, what would you say?
💡 Your responses stay on this page only — screenshot or copy them into your ePortfolio to keep them.
6f.1.6 Revision Check
🎯 Quick check — 10 questions
Test what you've just learned. Answer all 10 before submitting.
1. What was the stimulus for Within Her Eyes?
2. Which three theme pairings are at the heart of the work?
3. What is the choreographic intention of Within Her Eyes?
4. What is the unique physical rule of the duet?
5. Which earlier stage production did Within Her Eyes grow out of?
6. How did Cousins create most of the movement material?
7. In the choreography, what does the male dancer never do?
8. What do the letters DLIE stand for?
9. Which phrase fits the Interpret step of DLIE?
10. Why is there no repeating movement motif in Within Her Eyes?
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Take a screenshot of your score now and paste it into your ePortfolio document so your teacher can see your progress.