Week 2 of dance improvisation and reflective practice and after exploring further into improvisation and getting rid of the nerves I was mostly excited for the lesson. After reading this weeks readings before the lecture I felt a little bit more clued in and confident about improvisation, and made me realize a little bit more that the thoughts and feelings I had towards improvisation are common, I especially liked,
‘its like learning to ski. At first you are just trying to keep from falling down. Soon you can change directions a little and look up at the horizon instead of down at the tips of your skis. Eventually you can begin to choose where you want to go and notice and adjust the details of how you are getting there. Not everything is a choice because you are also responding to gravity.’ (Spain, K, 2014, 93)
I felt like I could connect to this quote because during improvisation I feel like I’m taking baby steps and learning how to build my skills a step at a time and each week I’m stronger and starting to become braver and a lot more confident.
We started this weeks session with somatic exercise, connecting the body to the floor and feeling every muscle and body part and reconnecting with the body, we moved our heads from side to side slowly, and after a couple of seconds of doing this I felt like I’d lost the center of my head and couldn’t place it back. I also felt my body relax and become heavier towards the floor as I was no longer concentrating on the rest of my body, this enabled me to fully connect my body to the floor and feel each muscle along the floor. We also looked at trying to tense a single part of the body, for example the thighs, torso, feet etc. I struggled a lot to do this, not being able to isolate my body, it worked a lot better on my right hand side than my left, but even on my right hand side it wasn’t perfect.
We then moved into partners, I felt doing this I was connecting fully to Kayleigh, copying her breathing, her posture and every movement she did, like we were becoming one person. We had to mimic each others movements without having direct eye contact. We had most mutual decisions, there was only a couple of times throughout this exercise that it became more lead and follow, and this was only if the actions had stopped and we needed motivation to start the movement again, or if the movement was going to fast and one of us couldn’t keep up.
After the somatic practice, we went straight into an improvisation circle.. I can safely say I nearly cried when we got told to go into the middle of the circle and improvise in front of the whole class! When I first went into the circle I started to do movement I knew already and repeated a lot of the movement as I panicked! However my 3rd/4th time in the circle I had a lot more confidence to experiment with movement, and started to look at using smaller movement and using different ways to travel along the floor. I never thought I would enjoy anything like that as much as I did and as we moved on and started to copy people, I got copied by a few people and it was really interesting to see how the movement had worked, it looked almost like a choreographed piece with people stopping and swapping the person they were copying!
I firmly believe that my confidence is growing rapidly throughout the improvisation module, and I no longer want to cry every time I walk through the studio door!
Bibliography-
Spain k. 2014. Landscape of the now: a toptography of movement improvisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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