Author: Natasha Allen

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.

 

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 2^nd 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 3^rd 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.

Poirier to this lesson we received feedback from our previous formal assessment to I worked harder and focused more on this feedback, to not lose focus during movements and play with stillness but still be active within the moments of stillness.

 

We started the lesson of walking around the space creating eye contact with the group and shouting out the name of the person you’ve made eye contact with, we developed this and made it so you held onto the person’s name until you lost eye contact with them, then we moved on to a clapping exercise moving the clap around the circle, this exercise became difficult when we introduced two claps.
We then created a clump of bodies in the centre of the room and had one/two people walking through the centre, all these exercises where hard in parts but became easier the longer we did them. The bodies exercise was in sighting to see all the bodies moving together at once and closing the spaces around and becoming aware and alert to all the other bodies around you focusing on using awareness and looking at the different pathways you could take through such a small space.

We then looked at merging two groups walking at the same time together, to start with this was difficult trying to get into time with each other and being to know when to go and how slow to walk and thinking about being in the right space and the right time, however after doing this a couple of times over we managed to work out that we had to fit between the gaps of each other’s spaces and the bottom group at to walk a little slower than the top group to be able to make this work.
After swapping places within the space we realised that the it worked and looked better when the two groups where in the original spaces.

We then started to look into planes, using a low plane, medium plane, high plane and then mixing all three together. We looked into using different dynamics for example stillness and fast pace etc, this was partially interesting to me because within my feedback it said about exploring dynamics and looking into stillness and taking more risks, so throughout this exercise I focused more on taking risks with my movement and the dynamics than the actual movement itself, in doing this I started to realise that the movement was just coming naturally and it was a lot more original and non-habitual than it was when I thought about what I was doing.
I mixed together the three planes but mostly travelled on a low or medium plane, if we were to do this exercise again I would defiantly focus on taking more risks for a high plane to a low plane and using different dynamics to do this.

We then split into groups of 5 and each wrote a question down to do with improvisation I wrote –

‘How do you continuously improvise without getting stuck on movement?’
As during improvisation I always feel that I can continuously create movement for about 3-4 minutes however after that I get stuck and turn back to habitual movement and repeat the stuff I have created before.
In the end we decided to merge two of the groups questions together to create:

 

Will boarding my movement pallet help boost my confidence? /how do you improvise successfully without thinking time?

 We created a score between the group to help answer the question or to make the answer a little bit more clear. We split the space into 4 and used different items to make the improvisation harder/more interesting.
So we changed the dynamic of the movement using music, we gave them objects to base and use their movements around for example a bean bag and a basketball.
We thought that all these things will help increase the imagination of the improvisation and help them find different ways to ‘boarded their movement pallet’. We also thought with changing the music dynamic and not using a soundtrack they weren’t thinking of the 2.5minutes until they moved on, they were just completely thinking of how to make movement fit with the objects given.

Once the whole group had started to do our score we started to realise especially with the bean bag as the object that they were struggling to keep moving and catching and throwing the bean bag and had to constantly be reminded that they were supposed to be moving as well as throwing.
Thinking back to it now after watching the groups, they didn’t think of keeping the bean bag and moving with the bean bag before throwing it, or traveling along the same pathway as the bean bag did as it went across the space, I think they panicked and just wanted rid of the bean bag, instead of slowing down and thinking about it.

 

Whilst doing the groups scores I found I started to like Josh’s groups, where we were split into three groups and three sections of the room and each section had a different dynamic and plane, they also gave us imagery to think about whilst in these sections.
This help further to think about my feedback and to really take risks with each movement I do and use the different dynamics and planes, that I don’t have to just stick to on dynamic through the whole jam.

I also liked the group who used the moving around the room whilst 5/6 people were in the centre improvising. As to me it took the pressure of people watching of and made me just think about the movements I was creating instead of thinking of other people watching me, so I could create different movement and play around with movement and take risks.

 

I really enjoyed this week’s lesson as I felt I progressed and started to really understand the use of dynamics and taking risks and how I could use the planes to create movement. I am also starting to understand that slowing the movements down just for a second can really help you to develop the movement and using the slowness to create something I wouldn’t normally create.
Throughout this lesson I have also come to realise that the more I relax into the movement and stop thinking about what I’m going to next and start to think purely on the movement I am creating in that moment that I’m creating a lot more non-habitual movement.