After attending my first lesson of improvisation last week, I walked in today feeling fairly confident and enthusiastic to learn some new improvisation techniques.
This week the lesson started with a slow improvisation exercise, this allowed me to warm up my body. I enjoyed this as it enabled me to move in any way I wanted, which I feel helped my body to relax and become loose. This then developed into different stages. The first stage involved increasing the speed of the movements we were doing. This went on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the fastest you could move. I found the stage challenging because as the speed increased it made me panic because I couldn’t relax my body and let it move how it needed to in the short amount of time we had, so this led me to do more habitual moves which I then repeated throughout.
Think, Imagine, Move was the next stage. Obviously, this involved thinking of a move, imagining it and then moving your body into this position. This was a slower exercise which I found easier, as I had time to think about what new positions I could use. However after a while it was difficult to think of where I could move my body to next without repeating moves I had already done. Although, this makes me reflect back to something that Ruth Zaporah says “Everything is a movement even if it doesn’t feel like it” (De Spain 2014 p46). This comforts me in a way because I now understand that it wasn’t important where I moved my body to, as long as it moved somewhere.
Luckily as we progressed into the next stage which involved increasing the speed, I felt it was a lot easier, as I didn’t have chance to think about where my body was moving to, so this allowed me to go with the flow of my body and move to wherever it took me.
Towards the end of the lesson, we moved on to a tracking exercise which involved partner work. As Zaporah suggests that “Tracking involves mental activity however that means that you are not in the improvisation” (De Spain 2014 p46) I bared in mind the fact that tracking involves reflecting back on movements you may had already done as it “tracks the story of improvisation” (De Spain 2014 p46). During this exercise one person had to be the ‘Director’ and the other was the ‘Dancer’. The exercise progressed in stages as follows:
Stage one:
- Dancer improvised movements in a given amount of time, speaking words which related to the moves they were doing.
- The partner wrote down words they heard and movements they saw.
Stage two:
- The partner spoke the words they had wrote down in the format of a story.
- Reflecting back to stage one, the dancer improvised with the words being spoken.
Stage three:
- Progressed into a duet.
- Both dancing.
- Both spoke words they could remember from previous stages.
- Both had to improvise with them.
I found that the hardest part of the exercise for me was the duet, purely because I couldn’t predict what my partner was going to do or say next, which I found very challenging. However, as a whole the exercise really benefited me in order for me to experience tracking, because as a dancer, it is important that you have the skills in order to track and reflect back on previous movements, also to gain more spacial awareness in order to use the full space in a performance.
This week was also our first ‘jam’ session. I was feeling quite nervous for this as I was afraid that we would have to improvise movements for the full hour and that my body would run out of new things to do. However, surprisingly I really enjoyed the session.
As it was our first ever jam, our aim for the lesson was to create a score. For this the studio was set into three imaginary corridors, which we had to enter three times during a certain time point in the score. This exercise involved a lot of tracking, as we had to remember a movement sequence and then change which body part was moving each time. Sounds confusing yet it made sense at the time!
After taking part in my first jam I am feeling very optimistic for the next.
De Spain, K. (2014) Landscape of the Now. USA: Oxford University Press, pages 45-52.