We started this lesson by looking at Empathic Choreography, The communication between dancers, however empathy choreography also, occurs not only by means of actions but also of emotions… (Ribero, M and AGAR, F, 2011, 81).
After looking at this through a powerpoint, we started to walk around the space having this idea of empathy in mind and being aware of the other dancers in the space.
We then got into partners and carried out a swiping exercise, the exercise was simple and made me think more into planes and using the whole of my body.
We had little sequences if we matched the same planes as my partner, I found out that I didn’t sync well with most of my partners and mostly went the opposite way to my partners.
I found this exercise woke my body up and I found it physically challenging, especially trying to remember the sequences if we did the same movements as our partner.
During this exercise I was thinking about the questions that we were asking in the power point earlier on in the lesson –
- How is it possible to make a shared choice of movements during improvisation between two or more dancers, without previous agreement and without communication through words?
- What generates the sense nexus that is perceived when we watch a dance improvisation?
- Can we call choreography what we see when we watch dance improvisation?
(Ribero, M and AGAR, F, 2011, 72)
These questions to me describe my thought process and feelings towards the exercises perfectly.
We then turned the swiping exercise into a travelling exercise, with a person A and a person B, person A using the same planes as the previous swiping exercise and person B creating movement around person A. This exercise was challenging as creating movement around someone was difficult and I mostly used my head, torso and I was mostly grounded for the exercise.
We then developed this exercise, and had the swiping person with their eyes closed, this made the exercise harder and challenged me as I was incredibly nervous to walk with my eyes closed and panicked I would hurt my partner, however being the other person leading the person with their eyes closed was interesting and made me create movement that I wouldn’t of really thought of creating when I was avoiding the swiping arms. Whilst working with my partner guiding them whilst there eyes were closed, I found myself thinking more about helping my partner and slowing all my movements down linking back to the previous discuss about empathy.
We then moved on developing the exercise to copying the person in front of us with every movement they did, this in itself was challenging as I started to work with people that I had never worked with before and moved differently to me, so copying the movement was difficult to follow.
Copying other peoples movement also helped me to expand my movement pallet and put myself in someone else’s body, making me see improvisation in different ways.
When then developed this exercise further and started to look at backwards blinking, as we started to learn how backwards blinking worked whilst walking around the space I become confident in myself, however when we moved on to doing the previous exercise whilst backwards blinking I lost trust and confidence in myself.
It was challenging and I felt that I didn’t grasp this idea as well as other member’s in my group did, for example I couldn’t keep my eyes closed for as long as I had hoped for.
I also found this exercise challenging because when my partner was down, I was mostly always still standing, I struggled to keep with my partner.
I also struggled to connect the movement together with my eyes closed as I couldn’t image what my partner would be doing next, linking back to last session’s discussion on imagery.
The last exercise we did was looking more into implusing and using the idea of imagery to develop this exercise, we got given three different images to explore: Kitten, Seaweed and wrestler’s.
These really helped me to develop my implusing improvisation as It gave me a reason to touch the places I did on Hannah, for example
I picked her up and moved her physically and it changed the way I explored my movement.
I also felt during this exercise that I understood it a lot more than in previous weeks.
I explored working more with Hannah rather than just following and touching and watching the videos back I realized that our impulse started to look more like a duet.
I really enjoyed this exercise and this weeks lesson and I feel a lot more confident within improvisation and I feel I understand a lot more about the ways and how’s improvisation.
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