In this week’s improvisation session we started with an exercise that was purposely made with the intention to loose our habitual movements. This is the aspect of mine that has started to slowly improve, however I still found it challenging, because Kayla told us to incorporate these specific themes into our improvisation.
Firstly we had to move whilst imagining our legs were knives. I did this by moving my legs in a sharp motion and always keeping them straight whilst moving. Secondly we had to move whilst imagining our arms were like spaghetti then moved on to making the back of the head opposite to our belly button. Afterwards we had to move in the position of which the nose was in contact with the floor whilst the bum was in the air. Finally we moved on with the idea of all the cells in the body having a race with each other. These mini exercises helped me to think about moving my body in different ways, which therefore helped me to forget about habitual movement.
The exercise that I thought helped me to shake off habitual movement was the one that made me imagine that every cell in my body was having a race. This was because I was moving my body in a very fast way, which therefore gave me less time to think about what movements to do next. This meant that I would just move my body without over-thinking it, which made me create more interesting shapes with my body.
We then moved on to create a score, which involved seven dancers, lasting for ten minutes. I was one of the dancers and I had to start off the score with the idea of my head touching my sit bones. This challenged me as I had to think of improvising movements whilst always trying to complete this challenge and movement shape. However the main purpose of this score was having the idea of developing or echoing movements that other dancers in the space were doing. This could mean making the movement bigger or smaller or developing current movements already happening in the space. We also had to focus on exiting the space, whether this was to exit the space or exit the wing to move into the space. I feel that there was a lot of rules to this score which made it more challenging to try and remember it all and then apply them.
Buckwalter says “orchestra of senses” (Buckwalter, 2010, 91). This implies that Buckwalter believes improvisation is not all the visual side but can be kinesthetic to the dancers as well. This then links into the scores we do in our lesson because I have to be aware of the other dancers in the space.
In the jam we experienced two new experiments whilst improvising which were called thick skinning and impulses. These experiments involved partner work. Thick skinning was interesting because this was the first time we did intimate partner work. I found this interesting as I had to think on the spot, but not only from my body, as I also had to work with what material my partner was dancing. Impulses involved us to physically touch our partner, with my decision on how to touch my partner impacting the decision in which my partner moved. This was interesting to see Millie performing movements based on what decisions I made.
We then completed a score in which the people in the wings impacted what was happening in the space. This was because there were dancers moving in the space and if the rest of the dancers in the wings thought that the movement was established they would walk across the stage in a straight line, which then made all of the dancers exit the stage. This motion looked like a wave and made the dancers as a group have more of an impact on the structure of the score. I thought this was interesting and different because we had never done a score like this.