Week 1, Bean Bags.

For our first week of Dance Improvisation and Reflective Practice, we focused on using our bodies to enhance our spatial awareness for when we begin to fully focus on Improvisation in ensemble work. This was an important process to go through as when we begin this work we will need to have an awareness of the dancers around us.

Throughout this session we used different rules to create a short piece of improvised movement between partners, these rules consisted of 6 things;

  1. Throwing the bean bag to each other stood still,
  2. Moving around the space while throwing it too each other,
  3. Every time we heard someone drop a bean bag we had to fall to the floor,
  4. We passed the bean bag to one another using a throw, freeze, and run phrase, where we would constantly be changing distance between us.
  5. When throwing the bean bag we had too make a noise and continue the noise until it was dropped or in the hands off our partners,
  6. Like rule five we had too make noise when passing between each other but halfway would swap who was making the noise.

Once experimenting with all the different rules, we were then set the task of working in an ensemble and using 4 of the rules and creating a 5 minute phrase using our bodies to sense the timing.

Our main goal was to find an finishing position together, that we would sense was the end, unfortunately we weren’t able to succeed in this.