Blog 16/3

The class started very similar to any other, we began by walking round the room making eye contact with other dancers, just trying to collect awareness of everyone else in the space and trying to find a connection with them. Collectively, we had to stop moving and start again with no vocalisation, similar to what we have done before, which I noticed that we’d improved on and I felt that we were able to use each other’s energies more than we had previously.

We then got into a clump and had to separate for another body coming through us, which meant we had to be aware of how everyone else was moving and our reaction to that. We had to be able to sense when the clump was moving in order to initiate the reaction at the right time for the bodies to perform the task.

Then in two groups, we had to cross each other at the same pace and within the same time. Which means that there had to be a collective awareness of what the other group and your own group were doing, we needed to be able to react quickly to where each body was in order to avoid collisions.

We were then exploring kinespheres and started by travelling across the room using:

– low kinesphere which I found enjoyable and explorative as I enjoy working in and out of the floor and enjoyed looking for new ways to use the floor in my movement.

– middle kinesphere which wasn’t easy for me at first as I struggled to differentiate between what was classed as low or high, I enjoyed this though as I was able to explore other movements without switching kinespheres.

– high kinesphere I felt was hard to stay away from habitual as there are very few explorations that I discovered and I wasn’t able to improvise quick enough. I felt like I needed more work on that one as it didn’t come as easy to me as the others and I would like to explore that more.

– combination of the three was the one I enjoyed the most as I was able to move more freely and didn’t feel any restrictions to explore anything that I found interesting in my body.

We then had to focus on introducing stillness, slow-motion and bursts of energy which, at first, was difficult to focus on as I had just got comfortable in my body with exploring the different kinespheres, but I found that I particularly like the stillness and slow- motion as I found that I was able to look for different sensations in my body that I enjoyed and was then able to explore them. After finding a movement that felt good in our bodies, we were asked to explore it. From a few weeks back, I enjoyed the isolation of the body parts and I feel like that is something that I really like exploring. So in our development, I was leading with my left elbow and I found different movements through opposition of body parts, for example, my right knee and finding different feelings in the movement that I enjoyed.

“In order to make rituals that create change, we need to remain in an experimental mode, whilst holding fast to the elements our rituals are weighted in time” (Halprin, 1995)

‘Does habitual movement ever stop? Does it ever leave your body? Is it possible to do a full improv class without habitual movement?’

Anna Halprin discusses the use of scores as a structure for a performance. We created our own scores in groups based on our question and the RSVP cycle:

Resources: Instruments- Drums, Glockenspiel.

Scores: No more than six people in the space at a time, every drum beat is a switch/change in number of people in the space, glockenspiel, stillness and the group is to work together and find movement together, clap- body part of their choice stays in contact with the floor.

Our score highlighted how reluctant some dancers were to enter the space and if I was to recreate this score I would have everyone dancing altogether to alleviate the pressure that some people feel. I also think that it would’ve been helpful in our score if we had stated the body parts so we could compare different movements and find similarities between them.