Prior to the lesson I was feeling quite nervous, as I haven’t experienced a lot of improvisation before and this is not something that has ever appealed to me, so I didn’t think I would enjoy it. Previous to looking at the reading set for this week, which was called ‘Dear Practice…:The experience of improvising’ (Midgelou, 2012), I thought improvisation would be where you get thrown on the spot and have to create a dance, which scared me a little to say the least! However, I found this article very interesting as it highlighted and broke down someone’s personal concerns about improv’, which reassured me that most dancers go through the same worries that I do. During this article the dancer writes to the practice “I dance without a plan – without a predetermined direction – without any known end.” (Midgelou, 2012 p10) This statement helped me a lot, as in a way the author is summing up improvisation, so this gave me an idea of what to expect which reassured me.
Our class involved getting into partners and throwing and catching a bean bag between two people, whilst running around trying to get into space. Numerous rules were added to this which I found made it more interesting. For example:
Rule one – If you heard a bean bag fall on the floor, then you had to drop to the floor, get back up and then continue playing.
Rule two – Once you had thrown the bean bag you had to freeze until you caught it again.
Rule three – Whilst the bean bag was in the air you had to make a sound until your partner had caught it.
We then had to get ourselves into groups and create a score, which had to then be performed in front of the whole class. The rules fixed in our score were…
- We started off with two people on stage throwing the bean bag using rule three.
- The rest of us then joined them onstage throwing the bean bags to our partners. However, we didn’t use sounds.
- If one of you dropped your bean bag, both you and your partner had to jump up and then freeze until someone else dropped theirs.
- Whenever the two people making the sounds said the word “shh” this meant that everyone had to drop to the floor, including the people frozen. The score carried on when the next word was said.
- If the two people making the sounds drop their bean bag after the word “shh” was said, then this meant we all had to get up and switch partners.
Overall I think our score worked really well once we all understood the rules. However, as the whole thing was improvised, as none of us knew when someone would drop their bean bag or when the word “shh” was going to be said, or even know what partners we were going to switch to, this made it extremely difficult to rehearse and perform as we didn’t know what the outcome would be. I would say that our score was infinite as we didn’t create an ending beforehand, so the score could have lasted forever. However, during our performance we realised we needed to end it somehow, so in order to do this we trusted the people making the sounds to create an ending we would all understand as they were the ones shaping the score.
Towards the end of this lesson I found myself feeling highly confident with the thought of improvisation, as this lesson intrigued me as I never thought throwing a bean bag around could be seen as improvisation.
Midgelou,V. (2012) Dear Practice…: The experience of improvising. Choreographic Practices, 2(1), 9-24