Week 9
The past semester of improvisation has been a real eye open for me, having never been taught improvisation or improvisation skills before I’m proud of what I have accomplished throughout the nine weeks.
After reading through my blog from week 1 and noticing repetitive confidence issues and worries about improvisation, I have now come to realise that improvisation is not about right and wrong, it’s not about being better than anybody else it’s about you and your body and how you push and move your body to its limits, pulling yourself away from habitual movement and creating original movement.
During last weeks and this week’s lesson I started to realise that I had become a lot more confident within my body and my movement, I started to not think about the movement or the task ahead and throwing myself into each and every task, fully exploring and developing each movement.
I have also found that I have worked ways into my body on how to develop movement, instead of creating loads of different movement, I have started to think about using an internal body part or twisting/pushing/pulling different body parts to create a new pathway.
The last lesson for me was a real big turning point within my improvisation module, we started with conversation movement, travelling the length of the room, I found this especially interesting as I worked with Hannah and Gabby, who have totally separate ways of moving in improvisation. I found with Hannah, we worked mostly doing over and under movements, fighting to come out on top, which for me created a lot of movement, I found ways of moving from under someone I had never even considered before, and ways of blocking Hannah from moving much further.
However, when I travelled the space with Gabby, I noticed that our movement was a lot more contact reflecting of each other, using each other to push across the room, developing each other’s movements.
I have started to notice that working with different people I have started to use their own little ways of developing movement and using that to develop mine, which has given me a much large scope of skills to develop my improvisation movement.
We finished the session of by an open jam, I found myself in the space for a lot longer periods of time, I also noticed that with the pressure of assessment day and with a second marker watching in, that I tried a lot of different movement and tried a lot of different improvisation skills, more than I would have ever felt comfortable doing before. I focused a lot on smaller movements, working through every little movement in the larger movements to fully develop my improvisation.
I have also noticed that as a group we have become as a collective, working together to create movement rather than working as an individual creating solo improvisation, I have also noticed that in myself, even when I’m working as a solo improvisation I’m still thinking about the collective, watching other people’s movements to see how I can contrast and enhance their movement, which is something I would have never thought of doing at the start of semester.
I also learnt how to evaluate myself in a way which will not always be negative, I learnt to take on board what was being said to me, I learnt this mostly through scores as well, receiving feedback about the scores we had created and seeing the good and the bad and being to improve.
I have learnt so much through the way of improvisation skills, skills which will also help me through other modules, and helped me to think outside of the box.
Improvisation has really helped my confidence in all areas of the course and has also give me extra confidence for second year. I have found myself starting to ask questions such as ‘what can I do to develop this?’ or ‘how can I improve my movement?’ I’m excited to start contact improvisation next year as I feel it will be really insightful and help me with composition.