In this lesson we started the class differently to previous weeks doing a jumping exercise to get ourselves thinking, warm and ready for class. We worked as a collective jumping and adding arms to the jumps on odd counts. Having to coordinate the arms was difficult at first because of working in rows and other individuals turning on different counts. We all had to find stillness at a certain point in time going row by row, this didn’t always work because we were preoccupied with other things around us.
We worked with imagery for the first improvisation exercise putting our reading into practice. In the Buckwalter reading, it speaks of an exterior and interior dance image; what is seen by the audience as a spectator and what a dancer works from to make movement happen. It also talks about senses saying “there is an orchestra of senses, including the kinaesthetic, involved in the perception, making the watching of a dance a full-bodied experience.”(Buckwalter,2010, 91). This quote I found was really interesting as watching a dance is not just visual, we also sometimes without realising, take the images of the performance through the ears too, making dance much more accessible and aesthetical to watch. Methods of creating imagery are discussed in the reading, you can bring the imagery to the improvisation in four ways:
- Physical exploration
- Visual art (looking at drawings)
- Specific environments
- Poetic language
We physically explored imagery and were given five to work with, these were:
- Having knives as legs
- Having spaghetti as arms
- Cells racing in the body
- Trying to get our head as close to ur sit bones as possible
- Making our nose lower than our lower body
When improvising having knives as legs, I focused on the shape of a knives blade making my movement angular and rigid. I noticed that a lot of my movement was performed on the floor with a focus on the legs and feet being really restricted and stiff. Repetition started to occur after a while as I couldn’t think of new movement and slowly started to loose concentration. When we improvised having spaghetti as arms I focused on the texture of spaghetti and made my movement quite loose and ‘slippery.’
For the second improvisation exercise we watched a short video and discussed the idea of ‘thick skinning,’ the idea of staying close to other bodies in the space. For this exercise we kept switching partners to work with new people and try different things out. I enjoyed this exercise as I was experimenting with weaving in and out of people’s bodies and seeing how far I could push my body. When my partner decided to change the movement, I found this difficult because I had to make a conscious decision of how to move with them; every partner was different. To be able to work effectively the movement had to be slowed down to work with your partner to find the movement and connection together.
For the last exercise we had quite an open score being allowed to do anything in the space that we had learnt in previous weeks. Kirsty also discussed accumulation, diminishment, retrograde and echoing as choreographic techniques we could apply in the improvisation. For the improvisation jam we used a technique called ‘tidal wave,’ where you had to make eye contact with other people and then collectively move into the space. For this exercise I found it difficult to initially go into the space with people; after not improvising for a week I felt less confident being in the jam as much as I was previously. Despite being told about different improvisation techniques, most people just used thick skinning throughout this exercise as well as echoing and complimenting movement.
I found the improvisation class more difficult than other weeks, even though the imagery acted as a stimuli for the improvisation. Finding movement to fit it without becoming too repetitive was hard. Hopefully in the upcoming weeks I will start to feel more comfortable and confident in the improvisation jams also.
Bibliography
Buckwalter, M. (2010) Composing while dancing: An improviser’s companion. Madison, Wis: The University of Wisconsin Press. Pages. 90-105
CFD13 Annie Lok, Ian Garside, Eszter Gal, Andrew Wass and Laura Doehler improvisation ensamble
. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTMCfI21qMM [accessed 2 March 2016].