Who would’ve thought that jamming to your favourite song would be classed as improvisation?
The first part of our class didn’t even feel like a lesson. The aim was to dance around to the first song that popped into your head. Swapping songs with a partner was the best part as it was hilarious how many peoples song was ‘Uptown funk’! This task was useful as it got us warmed up for the lesson in a different more interesting way than normal. The reading for this week asked us “can we call choreography what we see when we watch a dance improvisation?” (Ribeiro, 2011, p72) and in my opinion I agree that we can call it choreography, purely because even if the movements weren’t already choreographed prior to the performance, the dancer is still making the choreography within the improvisation.
Imagining our bodies in different situations was also an interesting task as it was something I had never experienced before. Firstly we had to imagine that our top half of the body was made out of spaghetti and the bottom was made out of knives. You can imagine how confusing and difficult this would be! We then had to imagine that our left hand had to stay four inches away from our right elbow at all times, and we had to improvise a dance like this. During this, I found myself doing more habitual moves because I felt restricted. So the easiest thing to do was to link moves I already knew would work with these limitations. The last one was the most challenging of all because we had to pretend that all of the cells in our bodies were having a race with each other. I found this very difficult because how on earth do you make your body look like every cell is moving? This is a question that I thought about a lot! In the end I realised the easiest thing to do was to move my body as fast as I could, which made me do more non habitual moves which is the key for improvisation. This exercise made me reflect on something I read in ‘Composing while dancing’ (Buckwalter 2010), the author says that “While there is one image, there are two different perspectives” (Buckwalter, 2010, 91) this links me back to the task we were set because whilst I am creating these different interpretations of movement, other people might see a different perspective of it.
The next exercise involved standing in a diamond shape. In this task we had to copy movements off of the person you were facing. Whenever the person you were copying from changed to face another person in the diamond, then you had to change what you were doing and copy the next person. This was challenging because you had to pay close attention, so that you didn’t miss the changeover between people. This carried on and developed into different stages. In the second stage, you had to still copy the person. However, you had to make the movements smaller, I felt this stage was easier because there was no right or wrong way to do it because it was your own interpretation. I found it more difficult in the next stage when we had to make the movements bigger, because the movements were already relatively big. So I found it very hard to think outside of the box in order to emphasise the movements.
Observing the final task was very intriguing because I had to observe seven dancers use exiting as a strategy but in there theme, they had to find as many ways for their heads to touch their sit bones. I noticed that the dancers were unsure at first as to how they would do this and you could see this through their dancing as they used slower moves so that they had time to think about where to move to, so this meant they weren’t technically improvising as they used habitual movements. This then led onto me being one of the performers, however this time we had to include the fast cells theme from earlier on in the lesson. I felt that it was hard for me to enter the space because I didn’t feel connected to the other people on stage (although the observers did see connections).
This week’s jam was completely different to normal. The focus was on thick skinning and impulse. This was something I had never done before and I found the thick skinning especially difficult. I felt that it was hard to stay close to a dancer and compliment their moves without actually copying them. However I really enjoyed the impulse task! I think that this was because you literally had to let your body relax and move wherever it needed to, so this didn’t involve much thought.
Buckwalter, M. (2010) Composing while dancing: An improviser’s companion. Madison, Wis: The University of Wisconsin Press. Pages. 90-105
Ribeiro, Monica m.; Fonseca, Agar. Research in Dance Education, July 2011, Vol. 12 Issue 2, p71-85