This week was one of my favourites so far. We did a task that mainly filled the session, where we used various different techniques that were to improvise in the space. In two groups we took 5 minutes at a time to go in and out of the space improvising with different stimuli, the freedom of this exercise was incredible, knowing that there was no right or wrong in what were doing and just being able to explore the space was very enjoyable.
The techniques we used were –
So, this week our reading was all about intention and awareness.
Intention – What I got from this reading about intention is that although Improv is intended to be spontaneous and show a new level of movement we should always have an intention to what we do otherwise, is there any point doing it? Improvisation should always start with some sort of stimuli or place to go with the movement.
Awareness – So what I got from this part was that during improvisation we should always be aware of whats around us. This doesn’t mean that we need to notice what is happening around us but we need to feel what is happening, for example if someone was to be dancing behind us we need to be able to be aware of where they are so the improvisation of both dancers, may they be dancing together or dancing apart, so we don not disrupt the process that is happening.
This week we worked on using speed and pathways in improv and how they influence our movement.
Speed – We used a scale of 1-10 and as the scale got higher we had to speed up our improvisations. At first this idea confused me as I felt the movement I was doing made no sense and look ridiculous, but in actual fact the more exhausted I became with movement vocabulary the more I was able to go into a completely different vocab that ended up looking very interesting.
Pathways – So we used this idea of pathways by picking a pathway and dancing across it and trying to not use our habitual movements or the same movement more than once on a single journey. I picked the diagonal across the studio because I felt this would’ve been long enough to find some interesting movement and I wanted to be able too interact with the other dancers in the space also to see what could happen with that.