Dance Improvisation to me is a very exciting yet challenging style. The freedom to improvise movements in your own space and time is interesting to me, as I have never had that opportunity in my previous dance training before. Because of this I will find it hard at first to approach the style just because of the minimal background knowledge I have on the dance style. I am looking forward to learning about the concept of this dance styles and the different choreographers/theorists and see their views and thoughts on the different aspects dance improvisation includes.
In todays lessons I completed a partner exercise which involved Millie and myself throwing a beanie bag to each other, which then progressed through different stages for example the first development was when we heard any bean bag drop to the floor within our class we all had to fall to the floor, the second development was after throwing the bag we had to shout a random sound. Lastly the third development was after throwing the bag then freezing your position until you have the beanie bag again. I believe this challenged by thought process because I always had to be thinking which development we were doing aswell as concentrating on catching and throwing the bean bag accurately to my partner. I learnt that I had to concentrate on a few different aspects within the environment. This then progressed into a group activity in which we created a score.
Our score was finite which means we created it to have an ending. The choices we were having to make within our score was having to decide what sounds we were going to make whilst throwing the beanie bag at our partner. This decision was therefore unfixed as throughout the different pairs within the group it gave us freedom on which sounds to say when doing so. I believe the score had a slight sense of structure as the pairs went into the space one pair at a time and the next pair which was due to go in after counting twenty catches and then that group went into the space to start the throwing and catching and so on until all pairs were in the space. Each level of throwing the beanie bag made the score more visually interesting for the audience as we as dancers incorporated the stages we did previously in the lesson into this score. I believe the function was clear if the audience had some sort of background knowledge on techniques of dance improvisation however if a complete outsider member of audience watched they could be more confused on the concept of the score and they could be unsure on how it relates to dance.
After the dancing the score my group watched the other group’s score and then thought of two questions we had that we wanted clarifying or were unsure about. The other group then asked questions on our score and it was interesting to see how they interpreted our score. ‘Learn to maintain a state of continual surrender of conscious vulnerability, give up expectations of pre knowledge and control’ (Mideglow, 2012, 11) I believe this quote sums up todays class for me because I will have let go on all my habitual movements and start having a more open mind on dance improvisation. This will be my main challenge throughout these classes to completely let go and not to keep thinking does these movements look ‘pretty’ or ‘right’ but instead learn to trust my gut instinct and go through with the movements.