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 –

•  Echo
• Copy
• Diminish
• Augment

 

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.

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.