Month: April 2016

WEEK 9
The final week!
Today’s class started with walking around the room to highlight tension combined with roll downs. Tasks like these get my mind and body into thinking and performing simultaneously, and also collectively. I also find it helpful as you can cover lots of the space and get to know the space better, especially walking into the corners and around the bars as I never cover them spaces in my usual class. The conversation task in pairs was great! I loved working with new people and using imagery to initiate our movement. I was really thinking about my habitual movement and how I can stay away from that as much as possible; working with different people each time really helped me to continue this throughout this task. The imagery would be spaghetti or water for example, so that helped me to think to move more fluidly and initiating movement from places like my thumb or my bellybutton.

This task was to be part of our final jam…
The Thomas Lehmen task was interesting as one person in groups took on the task of being…
– The movement maker
– The interpreter
– The manipulator
– The observer
I took on the role of being The manipulator. This was new for me as other than ‘impulse’ tasks, I have never singularly been the one to effect the movement and what was happening. I wasn’t throwing instructions out everywhere as we all needed to save our energy for the hour assessment jam later. The Lehmen task helped me to visually see non-habitual movement, one instruction I gave was to remain laying down and lead movement with the ankle. It was nice to see the thought process in which happened for this movement to take place. I was glad that this task would be part of the assessment jam as our group worked well with each other. These tasks got me thinking about the improvisation jam later on and eased my nerves as it was tasks that I felt comfortable with and new I could perform well. We all wrote down all the words that we had learnt over the weeks onto paper, which actually made me realise that we had covered a lot and come a long way in a short space of time.
Over the weeks in the improvisation classes with Kirsty, I have really enjoyed being in her company and learning from her. One main thing I have learned to do, which she ensures to have each class, is to have confidence in anything you do. I found week to week varied in confidence levels for me however if I did feel uncomfortable, it was okay to take 2 minutes to shake it out and then to carry on. My confidence grew after the first couple of weeks as my movement initiation was habitual, which I didn’t know then that it was habitual, however I would stick to what I felt comfortable with, whereas now I try and stay away from my habitual movement. This is huge for me as I found the change difficult which effected my confidence but in week 4 that all changed for me, I loved class and really enjoyed myself and since then the confidence stuck with me.
Tracking has played a huge part during my time in improvisation class as that technique helped me to improvise in a non-habitual way. By tracking my body and knowing what the movement before was and where it came from, helped me link it to the present movement and also made me think about the next movement. Kirsty would also let us track our body for stiffness and tightness which also impacted on what my movement choices would be. Spain, K says “What you track is usually a function of your improvisational values”. (Kent de Spain, 2014, 48). In week two, this stuck with me through the class and has done ever since as tracking has become a part of me and my improvisation journey.
A few time we experienced felt time, which was strange as you over thought thinking about the time. I would often slow down and speed up counting in my head, however I was very tempted to stand when someone else did but then forgot my time… It is still one to work on I think!
Over the 9 weeks we worked on stillness. We used stillness in many ways, in partner work, to highlight movement in jams, to contrast to the fast movement or even in cases where stillness was the aspect of the task. I think stillness helped me “be in the moment”. I believe that once you have the confidence you can be in the moment, the moment of feeling loose with your movement, feeling like you could keep going. The rush you feel when being in the moment, when the ideas flow continuously, when you connect with the other bodies in the room and work together and know what they’re going to do. There have been many times where I have been “in the moment” and I loved it! I proved to myself that I can do it! The final improv jam was insane! I felt so confident, I was in the moment, I was using lots of the key skills for me such as, focus, stillness, thick skinning, spatial relationships and peripheral vision.
The classes I have had have changed my experience as a dancer in general as now I feel more open to try new things as I hated improvisation and would never use this technique. I will definitely use improvisation in the future to help with routines or for it to even be apart of future routines. It has changed my outlook on dance and me as a person, making me more confident and think about my movement more, rather than just doing any old movement to fill a phrase.
The final class, especially the jam was truly ephemeral just like my entire experience in this improvisation and reflective practice class! An amazing experience in trying something new and one in which I can’t wait to continue.

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

 

 

WEEK 8
This week we started class differently, I find checking in with our bodies helpful as this class is strenuous and requires my body being in top form. Scanning my body really does highlight all the parts that feel uncomfortable and then in my own time to do what I need to, to fix that tightness. When we focus on breathing I really feel it fill my body and expand my ribcage and then breathing out, really pushes my body making it heavier into the floor. The rocking motion side to side helped loosen my lower back after being laid there a while, I felt grounded into the floor.
INNER RHYTHM
Controlling our movement was a nice stretch for me, the combination between crunching into foetal position and stretching going into the other side really worked my abdominals. As the pace quickened I quickly remembered that dance, no matter how simple the step, would always be challenging. I felt the endurance of the stretch tighten every time but it was a nice pain that I experienced. I counted my timing and tried to keep it throughout whilst executing the movement fully.
We developed this further into the child’s pose and downward dog. This was a great way to do an all body stretch. Finding fluidity between these two positions and exploring these two positions was fun but also hard as I was thinking of being fluid and having internal movement. Keeping the fluidity, we needed to move around the room using all of our bodies. Certain restrictions were hard for example, move without using your legs and no arms. It made me think more personally and think about taking these things for granted and I found it really hard to move fluidly and with control. I felt limited to my movement and resorted to using my lower kinesphere more that getting up and down as I didn’t have the support from my arms or legs in either cases.
We walked around the space which gave me time to relax my body again and check in with myself again. We combined stillness, fixed positions and added short phrases of our own movement within walking to change up the dynamic. I found it easy to change up my movement and followed everyone to stay in sync with everyone too. I always try and cover the space in the studio which people don’t necessarily use, such as the part near the mirrors. I enjoy working in those areas of the studio and enjoy trying new combinations of sequences both controlled and not controlled.
This week’s most important chapter from the reading.
A particular paragraph in this week’s reading really stood out for me and related to me, this section was called ‘Critical Training in the Improvisation Class.’ (Lavender, 2001, 204) Lavender talks about “The improvisational prompt.” (Lavender, 2001, 204), this relates to myself as it talks about the different rules and prompts given to the students to help their creative and critical process, and how the students must spend a lot of time ‘engaging’ to progress more. It also says the prompts may be “exploratory” such as changing the speed or direction or run or walk and adding things in, or “compositional” such as structure, form, deleting, repeating and manipulate, and that we as students need to understand the difference. All of the individual ideas hopefully stimulate everyone in the class and inspire them. (Lavender, 2001, 205). This relates to out practice as I always watch others and feel inspired, but the planned and the spontaneous coincidences. Often in our jams, I will watch others and the combinations that arise are truly mesmerising and definitely inspiring for me. The prompts we get in class help me to think differently and make decisions that could dynamically change the whole piece or that particular section. I enjoy the continuous change in the prompts and cues that determine what I do in the jams or in phrases. I look at movement and treat movement differently every week, and I am always inspired by my class mates to do more.

Nancy Stark-Smith, The Underscore.

                     

These are all of the symbols in the underscore in which we had to choose form. Our group wanted to chose a wide variety of symbols to test the habitual movement.

SCORE
-8 minutes.
-following the R.S.V.P. rules from last week.
-also using the symbols from Nancy Stark-Smith, The Underscore.

Our score
– All start in the space
– Start with 1 minute of stillness, but this will be self-taught time
– After the dancers thought one minute was up, they move on the spot in their own kinesphere
– At 2 minutes, they use the ‘expanding and travelling’ tool from the underscore for 2 minutes
– At 4 minutes the dancer picks someone to ‘contrast’ to, for example in the levels, the dynamic or the direction of their movement for 2 minutes
– At 6 minutes the dancers use the ‘touch and connections’ tool for 2 minutes, this could be contact and non-contact
– We time it form the start and prompt each rule throughout, when 8 minutes is up we tell the dancers to come to an ending position without just stopping and that will be the score finished

Some things I noticed was some intentional synchronisation when in the ‘touch and connections’ section, lots of level contrasting and a contrast in the speed. The self-taught time was executed to 1 minute exactly and the rest of the class went up to 1 minute and 12 seconds, so the timing there was really good to start the score off. The purpose of our score was to test habitual movement, to see when it occurred the most and when people strayed away from it. Our question and answer session at the end was great for the feedback as we see things differently to how it will feel to the dancers performing it.

Q1- How was it starting the score with the self-taught time?
– There was more focus and got into the zone more
– They could think about the next step in the score and plan ahead
– Some people focused on the time more rather than movement
– Keeping the eyes closed after the self-taught time for a little while longer kept the participants more relaxed
Q2- How did you find your habitual movement? When was it more or less present?
– The traveling sequence was more habitual for some people
– Whereas the contact was more habitual as everyone played it safe and didn’t want o make it contact improvisation
– It was easy to predict what the others was going to do, so as a whole class the habitual thoughts
– People tended to stay low for most of the movement as they felt more comfortable in the lower kinesphere
Q3- How did you find the instructions in that they varied rather than being all very similar?
– It was good to change up the instructions rather than having the same ones or similar ones to usual
– The second instruction to stick to your kinesphere, most people found that restricting (which shocked me as I thought they would feel more comfortable being in their own space)
Q4- Any other good and bad comments about the score?
– The found the own kinesphere the hardest section
– The contact and connections section the most comfortable

Overall, I enjoyed this session in creating the score using the underscore and Lavenders reading to inspire my starting points and how my movement developed. The feedback from the score was amazing and helpful to know the though process of people performing your score.

Bibliography:
Lavender, L. (2001) From Improvisation to choreography: the critical bridge. Research in dance education, 195-209.

WEEK 7

Starting off the lesson with walking helps me check in with my body and flag up any areas of tightness and discomfort. It helps to warm up my feet and helps me to think about my spatial awareness and cover all the space in the studio that I would not usually normally cover. Adding little focus points and holding focus with others helps me to practice switching focus to and from the task and my inner-body focus. Collectively starting and stopping is great for me as I really think about checking in with the other dancers and think about working as a team.
Clumping together covering a small space as a group was interesting, as I don’t think we have all been in a small space with a small connective force. Opening and closing the bodies as people walked through was difficult as you could never see where the body was coming form. It was as though the people in the middle was an orange and we had to peel around the person moving through the space, closing the gap as soon as possible to keep that small space element.
Crossing the room in two groups was difficult to keep in time with each other and stay in line, as everyone had their own version of 20 and 10 seconds. The idea was to merge between each other and cross neatly. I wanted to tell people and take the lead however we wasn’t allowed to make conversation or discuss beforehand.
The next task I found very exposing and uncomfortable to start. In turn using our low, middle and high kinesphere to create movement to travel across the space. Often I wanted to resort to habitual movement, however I took small pauses to really think about new movement and originating my movement from new places to open up the range of movement possibilities. I preferred the low kinesphere as I used the floor as a tool to help with movement and felt all my body using the floor. High and middle kinesphere movement was harder for me because even though I was thinking of new movement, I felt as though I had done that movement before, so I was overthinking instead of just moving. We focused on stillness, slow motion, burst of energy and combining them with all 3 kinesphere levels. Moving slowly was easier as I could track the movement and develop each movement as we went along. Paying attention to detail was the hardest as I wasn’t too sure on what we had to do. I wasn’t sure if it was making my movement more clear or adding detail to my extremities such as fingers and feet, I resorted in going slowly to ensure I was trying to do all aspects. I found this hard and strange, still very exposing.

In groups we spoke about what we thought about improvisation and what our feelings towards it was. In a question or statement, these came up in our group…
“IMPROVISATION COMES AND GOES IN WAVES IN TERMS OF MY CONFIDENCE” – this was my statement. The previous task influenced my statement as I wasn’t feeling very confident with myself or the movement after that. I didn’t think I had done good or shown to others that I was good enough.
“WHT ARE WE ACHIEVING?”
“IS THERE REALLY NO RIGHT OR WRONG?”
R.S.V.P. SCORES
R – Resources at our disposal
S – Sources
V – Valuaction of something that accompanies the process
P – Performance which includes the practical side of the dance and movement
Anna Halprin says “each part had its own internal significance”. (Halprin, p. 112) I kept this mind when deciding some of the rules for our own score. Trying to keep it interesting so that it would meet the time requirement of 8 minutes. It was hard to think ahead and see if it would last 8 minutes and keep people engaged and creating new movement.
Our resources-
A drum- the sounds would change the people going in and out. A maximum of 6 people would be in at a time and can do any movement.
A wooden instrument – this was to signal the people in the centre to choose a body part and keep it on the floor, making the range of movement harder and limited.
A clap – this signalled stillness within the people in the centre, leading them to collectively decide when to start moving again just like our warmups. Sensing the bodies in the space to know when to start moving without having a set leader.
Our source of music was a random song that was on in the background. But it didn’t have an impact on the music.
Overall our score went well, the instructions I think could have had a little more explaining as we had to explain them after every time we signalled a sound. Maybe we had too many sound instructions and not instructions that they controlled, such as eye contact with others to enter or when you see a certain movement then you have to entre with the same movement, or even only using one of the 3 kinesphere, something that makes them think more and them be in control, so we wasn’t just determine the movement. There was a lot of habitual movement however, I think that was because they was unsure and not confident and fully understood the rules and tasks we set.