Month: March 2016

WEEK 6

 

EMPATHY – A process that enables the understanding of emotions and intentions among people.

Empathy is a feeling and allowances that occur whilst dancing or improvising. We make changes in our own movement to work around others or with others to create ephemeral phrases and movements. Class today showed me that it is okay to make changes to our own bodies and have feeling and understanding whilst moving.

SWIPE

This was enjoyable as well as it working the body. I felt energised and ready to go and also focused this week on maintaining my focus throughout as last week I drifted in and out between tasks. The leg position and actively shifting my weight from side to side really helped with my arm movement being larger and sharp in the 3 directions of the planes of the body. I found keeping my concentration and recognising when we both did the same arm movement hard as I tried to keep a fast pace and kept my focus (eye line) on the arm that I was swiping. I found it good that me and my different partners challenged ourselves and kept the pace fast as then we could really use all of our body and not just isolate the legs and arms.

SIDE OF ROOM TASK

Developing the previous task for the next task made me pay more attention to details and how I moved rather than just moving. Having my eyes closed made my other senses more alert and I found it difficult to walk forward let alone do my arm movements too. I felt as though I was going to walk off of the edge of a cliff and felt like I had no space but when I opened my eyes I had plenty of room and wanted to do it again. Dodging the arms was harder as I didn’t know which arm swipe they was doing and in which direction they was going in, so the dodging was spontaneous and had to not be static but fluid and to articulate the spine more and initiate movement from non-habitual parts.

The next stage was interesting for me and felt really good to experience. Swapping partners was unlimited throughout so I tried to be with someone new each time as them I was benefiting from it. Copying the exact movement from the person inform of me was an eye opener, I was doing movement that I hadn’t thought of doing myself and it felt normal to do but strange as it wasn’t my habitual movement. At one point I felt under a lot of pressure as Kirsty was following my movement, I felt like I should have been a professional dancer. I haven’t really worked with Kirsty one to one so this really helped me be more confident and get my teacher to move like me for a phrase of movement. Back ward blinking helped link and create new movement within a movement phrase. I found it hard to piece the movement together as I would be in a different place to what the other person was, then I tried to end up where I saw them at but then they had moved again. It was different and a new experience so I found it useful and enjoyable at the same time.

IMPULSE IMAGERY

Seaweed- This was my favourite as I played around with how I took the impulse. I kept the impulse to a fast pace and tried to touch all the body parts I could to get my partner to be constantly moving and keep the movement original. I wish she had a faster pace when giving the impulse to me as I felt like I was constantly stopping and starting. I uses free and flowy movement, almost light as I imagined seaweed to float and move freely.

Kitten- I used my head and bottom (as a tail) as well as my hands to initiate the movement and kittens touch humans with all of their body. I kept the movement to a fast pace as kittens re full of energy and move quickly. My partner again was using the impulse slowly, so I kept being slow and always using the same body part. I tried to suggest body parts to impulse by using long movement but it didn’t really work.

Wrestler- The impulse for this was stronger and I pushed the body and physically moved the body as a wrestler was forceful. I didn’t like this one as I didn’t know what to do and my partner was repetitive. It was really hard to get into the mind set for this one.

 

THOMAS LEHMEN

Material maker- moves in the space

Interpretation- interpret what they see (echoing)

Manipulator- get in the way to influence the movement

Observation- looking at what is going on in the space

Mediator- microphone, controlling what happens in the space such as movement choices and rules

 

Next week we are having a look at this and having a go for ourselves and seeing how it feels.

WEEK 5
“Can we call choreography what we see when watching an improvisation?” (Ribeiro, 2011, 72).
This is a question in the reading that remained with me throughout the class. I thought that even if walking was set in a choreography, walking spontaneously is improvisation. For me a routine can be improvised to create the choreography, however some choreography has improvisation in it. Improvisation has a new understand form myself which I can now appreciate more and work through the steps to improvise in a way that people enjoy and in a way that I can develop my skills.
Starting with the walking and running task, helped me to find any spots of tension and tightness and allowed me to loosen up into class. We had set instructions which got my mind focused prepared for the remaining tasks to do. These instructions were things like, run to the centre and hold for 5 seconds in a huge cluster as a group, point to the favourite spot in the studio and freeze, fold down onto the floor and up again and stare at another person for 8 seconds and then let it go. The fold down wasn’t as easy as it seemed, I kept folding wrong ad getting up like I was an old lady- however the more I rolled down and came up, the more comfortable I felt. (It also got me thinking for the technique class that I would have in second year)
COLLECTIVE JUMPING TASK
In groups of 5, this task was frustrating as I would understand what to do however some people in the groups didn’t know or got confused so we had to start again. We managed it in groups but then making the task work as a collective was tough. We assed 2 arms to the sequence, which made me use my head even more, and also added different directions to jump on. I found this useful to remind me that a simple task still requires lots of mental thought and technique. (Such as the knees knocking in on the jumps). I feel more alert when we get given mental tasks to do- I definitely feel as though I can approach them more confidently and get my head round it a lot quicker which is an improvement for me.
IMAGERY TASK
The imagery task was a new experience for me and taught me a lot. We had to picture one given image at a time and move as though we were portraying that image. The first being ‘knives for legs’. Straight away I thought about doing long, sharp, straight and slick movement, at a constant medium speed. I felt shy in doing moves that wasn’t necessarily my habitual movement pallet as I felt like I needed more room to experiment even more although, talking with the rest of the class and giving feedback, we established that we could have taken one move on the spot and played around with it, and it didn’t need to be fast movement and rushing around creating more movement, it could have been slow and sustained and tracked more. Which would then bring in knowledge from the past couple of weeks. Another image was spaghetti for arms. This was hard and I felt as though I still needed to move my legs for the movement, when really I could have sat still and just moved my arms and focus on them. Again, I moved fast and started to run out of new movement. Finally, we had the image of cells racing, therefore I automatically moved faster and travelled around the space. I used all of my levels to get on and off the floor. This particular imagery left me feeling weak, light headed and dizzy. I enjoyed using different images to create my movement however, I still need to improve on tracking the movement so it becomes useful and efficient.

IMPROV JAM
•Accumulation, taking one movement and seeing where it ended up and took you
•Diminishment, getting rid of one thing and making it something else
•Retrograde, doing something backwards, or thinking of where it came from to make it more interesting
•Echoing, taking a movement off of others and copying or developing it

These points were the focus of the improve jam. At first I didn’t want to go in right away as I didn’t understand the rules and what to do with each point, however after watching the first people entre, I felt more confident.
The next problem was that we could only entre in a tidal wave. We had to communicate by the eyes to know when to entre. Not entering as and when we liked knocked me a little as some moments I was ready to entre but then lost the feeling when I couldn’t find no one to entre with- so I had to wait. I think I need to be more persistent and work on gaining people’s attention.
CFD13
Watching this video inspired me as it was so simple and beautiful to watch. The movement was controlled and tracked and showed me that all movement doesn’t need to be fast to be effective. Our task was to thick skin- a completely new way of doing movement, however I find it interesting and love doing. In pairs we started moving slowly and always kept in mind that we needed some point of contact, just brushing off of each other’s skin. I found this odd at first as I know my class mates however I had not been in there kinesphere before and up close and personal, so I found this task awkward and felt shy and not confident at all. The more we moved into pairs I felt more comfortable with thick skinning but kept coming in and out of focus- which made me relax and not think as much about my movement. Even though I was doing slow movement, I felt like time had stopped and I was still moving so fast. I also felt as though my partners wanted to go faster than what I did, so they would move on to transitioning onto the floor, and I wanted to stay standing and work through it slowly.
The end improve jam, combined this week’s and the previous weeks rules to determine out movement. I found I resorted to thick skinning, echoing and using distance to manipulate others movement. I enjoyed everyone working together, watching some phrases of movement created by others was great to see. So many different combinations all from the same instructions.
The main thing that I have learnt is that I can move slowly and think over movement that doesn’t need to me fast or performed at a high speed.

I enjoyed this week’s class and can’t wait to improve more!
Bibliography
Ribeiro. (2011) Research in dance education. Vol. 12

WEEK 4

 

WOW! What a class! Today was something else, amazing! For the first time I felt comfortable in what I was doing. I had the confidence to keep going into the space and interacting with others. I LOVED CLASS!

The class was a formal assessment this week, so I automatically felt nervous as previous weeks I haven’t felt right. This class usually scares me so much that I feel sick, however I went in with an open mind and I felt great. A positive mental attitude before class helped me maintain that attitude through the lesson.

One quite from the reading that I really worked on and kept in mind was “If you are concerned about how you are seen or what you are doing, time will press on your mind and squelch your creativity.” (Kent de Spain, 2014, 114)

In previous weeks I felt really conscious and silly creating new movement, so this week (and especially for the assessment) I tried my hardest to be confident and positive and to also stray away from my habitual movement and to also be more daring. I started from the word go, the warm up involved walking (with the hips and not leaving them behind), running and then dropping into press-ups (using the feet so we wasn’t heavy footed) and then also using our minds to quickly get into the specified number of people- this was also fun at the same time, which helped me relax into it even more.

FLOCKING

Flocking whilst in a horizontal line was harder than I thought it would be. Using my peripheral vision whilst maintaining a still position with my body and also thinking about staying in time with everyone, was brain overload! At one point, I tried to take the lead and the people on either side of me followed me but the rest of my line was doing something else from another person leading. This proved to me that we needed to do the movement slower than slow so everyone was able to stay in time and keep up with the chosen movement.

The glacial time/clock or felt time, was difficult as you would be thinking of the instructions of making solos, duets, trios, quartets and groups of 5, that you would forget to count the time or to even keep a mental note of how long you could have been moving for. I always find it hard to maintain stillness after moving as my blood condition makes my body feel numb and especially my fingertips, they feel as though they are going to pop. But this is something I need to work on myself and learning how to control it. I felt confident with working with new people, whereas the first session I would only really work with people I knew the most- which is a huge improvement for me.

We watched the “Ensemble Thinking Scene” by Nina Martin in preparation for our next task. The rules of the task were explained and we began with the task. Watching others move open my eyes as to when we could do each rule and how creative it could be, I found it inspiring and it motivated me to stay confident and keep going into the circle and move. I really liked and understood the “distance” rule, many of times I took a movement and performed it elsewhere in the space. I took a swoosh movement with my leg on a low level and did it right behind a group of people who were doing movement on a high level- this added contrast.

The focus element was the most intense as me and Leesh had a moment of constant eye focus, It was hard to keep a straight face and keep in the moment, however once we both got into it, it was as though we had planned to do the movement we had chosen. We took it slow and sustained so we could fulfil the movement but also make most of the moment we had. One thing I have learnt is that each moment of improvisation will not happen the same again, as every height and move will be different each time so just go with it. It is making me enjoy class even more each week.

Becca, Charlotte and Chloe had amazing focus at one point, keeping eye focus on the body part moving of someone else, this highlighted the movement and drew my attention to that movement whilst I was watching.

Nina Martin says in Buckwalter’s book that “Dancers don’t choose to enter the dance based on an intuitive sense of the building dace material, but to simply fulfil the score”. (Buckwalter M, 2010, 62).

This helped me realise and understand that the score was the most important part, and whatever movement we chose was to match and emphasise the score, not just because we felt like doing that particular movement.

I didn’t feel as pressured or shy this week, my actions and movement felt more natural, making me thoroughly enjoy the class.

 

Bibliography:

Buckwalter, M. (2010) Composing while dancing: An improviser’s companion. Madison, Wis: The University of Wisconsin Press

Spain, K. (2014) Tracking in Landscape of the Now: A topography of Movement Improvisation. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press