WEEK 5

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