Week 8
This sessions main focus was criticism both from peers and self-criticism, ‘we think that learning about the critical process of dance making best begins in the improvisation class, for this is the pedagogical arena in which students first begin to experience the struggles inherent to artistic creativity’ and ‘the must also spend time critically observing and discussing each other’s work’(Lavender, Predock-linnell, 2011, 204) in this week’s reading Lavender discusses why he believes that criticism is so important within the arts and throughout individual training. The quotes from lavenders book, to me personally really speak about what I’ve learnt throughout the improvisation module, has I have begun to critically look at my pieces at work and evaluating every piece of feedback I have been given. I also find the first quote quite personal to myself as I really struggled to be within the movement, however I have seen improvements within myself and through the weeks of writing my blog and being able to think back to what I could have done better and with Kirsty’s feedback I really like I have started to be within the movement and I am starting to push my artistic creativity.
We started this week’s lesson with a somatic exercise, focusing on our bodies and our breathing, checking in with our bodies and seeing how they’re feeling, focusing mainly on our breathing for the first part of this exercise really helped me to do this, ‘scanning’ my body for any areas of pain, any tension. I started to find parts of my body with tension that I hadn’t noticed until I fully relaxed and focused on my body.
we then started to roll backwards and forwards, getting faster to increase our heartrate, whilst checking in with our bodies I noticed a lot of tension within my shoulders, so as the pace increased with the rolling backwards and forward and started to press my shoulders into the floor to try and release some of the tension, which worked.
finding our way into a child’s pose, from there we started to experiment with our lower kinesphere, exploring with twisting, balance and pushing into the floor. As well as noticing tension in my shoulders in the previous exercise I had also noticed tightness within my hips and other areas of my body, so I started to use this exercise to stretch these out and find different twists and balances that would allow me to do this.
looking back on the lesson this week and one of the very first lessons we did on somatic and looking at twisting and pushing the body, I felt that my confidence and my level of risk I took has increased massively I felt I fully explored different positions and really pushed my body to its extent.
We started to move this exercise, and started to lead with different parts of the body, for example leading with our nose and elbow and we were also told to carry on with the movement not using either arms or legs.
I found that I didn’t struggle with this exercise as much as I had done when we first started improvisation, I found that I was finding different ways to lead with ‘my elbow’ like imaging the elbow from the inside of the body instead of the outside, and I found different pathways of movement. I started to focus more on what parts of my body I hadn’t yet used to initiate the movement.
As we came to standing we started to just walk around the room, going at any pace we wanted, and we started to create individual movement, using stillness and movement that lasts a count of 4.
I really struggled with this exercise, I found it hard to make the choice of doing something individual and mostly walked around the space changing my pathways and speed. Looking back on the lesson now I feel of could of pushed myself to go out of my comfort zone and just go for It. I feel from doing that I would have benefited a lot more from this exercise.
We then went on to look ‘the underscore’ and Nancy Stark – Smiths idea of the underscore.
‘The underscore can be seen as a vehicle for incorporating contact improvisation into a broader arena of improvisational practice.’ ‘as a way to focus and concentrate contact jams’ ‘opening out to full group improvisation with compositional awareness, and back to rest and reflection’ (Stark-Smith,2008, 90).
A few examples of Stark-Smiths idea of the underscore are as shown below:
Pow – wow –
Taking time to check in with the other who will be practicing the score: to introduce ourselves, set time parameters, mention any physical conditions we want others to be aware of and any other necessary practical information.
Attraction –
Sensing a pull toward something or someone – another dancer’s movement, quality, presence, body mass, the music; a patch of sunlight on the floor. Feeling a magnetic pull to touch, move with, move toward.
Repulsion –
Sensing your energy moving away from something or someone – a movement, object, sound, activity, body. Not a personal, social judgment but a momentary impulse to go in a different direction – away from. This could change in instant.
We then went into groups of to create our own score, as a group we decided that we wanted to split them into groups and have different sections.
We looked at using attraction and repulsion, looking at internal time, different kinespheres and connection and touch.
we wanted to explore the relationships between – people
time
objects
We also wanted to challenge people’s habitual movements. We created three different sections, the first group looking at attraction and repulsion, choosing someone within their group to be repulsed by and someone to be attracted to, I felt this section worked well as with them being in such a small space it made them think about different ways to stay away from someone and stay close to someone without just thinking about space, however with one of the groups just being a 3 it didn’t work quite as well for them.
the 2nd group looked at middle and high kinesphere with different types of imagery, we wanted to use imagery that would be used for a lower kinesphere to see how the different groups explore this, for example we used embodied a snake, embodied a shark and your legs are like bouncy balls.
I felt this really made the groups think about internal imagery instead of just physical and how to create ways around the different kinespheres.
The 3rd group looked at connections and touch with a ball as an object, they were only allowed to pass the ball between them by using the different body parts we told them they could use for example, only their torso, only their feet etc.
We found that this group struggled to concentrate on creating movement at the same as passing the ball, and mostly lost complete focus of the task at hand.
We change round the groups every 2 minutes and we asked them after the first minute of every different section to pause for 6 counts, this worked for the first section however this rule within the score got forgotten about.
At the end of our section we asked the group as a whole for feedback on our score I felt this helped me quite a lot to make improvements to my score and ways to make a better score if we are needed to again.
some of the feedback we were given where It made them think outside the box, exploring different ways of moving especially with the attraction and repulsion group. However, it was hard to concentrate with some much going on, and if I was to edit this score to use again I would try to simplify it so the movement was one of the main tasks of hand.
However, from the feedback we did manage to work out that our main reasons for this score – connections/relationships between – time, people and objects worked, as they noticed that if they had to focus on creating movement there internal body clock just went and they forgot about it, which is something that would be helpful to overcome.
We also got told that the connections between people started to become easier to connect rather than being too shy to touch and interact with people.
over all, I believe that our score was a success in ways more than one and we reached what we wanted to achieve however it could have been better if it had been simplified.
Bibliography –
Lavender, L. and Predock-Linnell, J. (2011) From improvisation to choreography:The critical bridge. University of New Mexico, College of fine arts.
Stark smith, N. (2008) Caught falling: the confluence of contact improvisation. Northampton, MA Contact Editions.