Monday 10th November 2014 – Week Seven – Formative Assessment 1-5
In today’s session we looked at going up into lifts more, I found this fun but challenging at the same time. There were a number of lifts we did today. The first one was where one person bent over and the other was being lifted off the ground balancing on the stable position your partner was giving you. When I did this lift with Toni we found it easier for her to pick me up then for me to lift her, this could have been because we were different heights and I couldn’t get low enough to pick her up. The next lift was where one person stands behind you and puts their hands across your shoulder blades, you then both signified together on when to go, this meant you bent your knees and the front person would jump whilst the person behind moved them backwards. We then did the ‘paper-clip’ lift, this was where the under dancer put one arm around the over dancers waist and then when ready the over dancer would come towards the under dancer signifying they’re ready to be lifted. The over dancer puts the same arm as the under dancer over the under dancers shoulder and then the under dancer lifts up to give the over dancer a little lift off the floor. The last lift was a little bit more complicated, meaning that the under dancer had to be very stable in the position they were holding. The over dancer swipes one arm over the under dancer’s shoulder and you had to put a bit of momentum into it, so it’s like going into a cartwheel. You have to make sure that the over dancer’s pelvis is in line with the under dancer’s pelvis, meaning you can get more height when your lifted. Once you have established that cartwheel momentum, the over dancer is in a side plank position on the under dancer’s shoulder. The over dancer must make sure their legs are mobilised in case they need to come down quickly. During this session we also got into pairs and we had to stay in contact all the time. I found this nice as you always had a connection with your partner when moving across the space, it also made me not think about what I was doing as all I was concentrating on was keeping connected with my partner and moving to the other side of room. Throughout this process today I have felt like I have become more confident in being the over and under dancer and I feel I can interchange from one to the other. When we came to the last bit of the session we were being filmed as part of our assessment, the whole group got into pairs and started with their heads touching. This was the beginning of our improvisation dance. My partner for this was Emma and as I have worked with Emma before in the past I always think I can’t give her my full body weight as I think I will crush her. Now that over the weeks I have become more confident with being the under and over dancer I felt much more relaxed working with her. This gave me a boost as I was experimenting with much more range of movement. We then came to sit in a circle while there were two couples in the middle improvising, people on the outside could watch and then go in and add to the couple to make a trio, then after a while one of the original couple members would leave and the cycle would go over and over. For instance, when I was sat out on the circle, Stacie and Georgina were rolling towards me and I felt that that was the right moment to join into the dance. When I was in the middle doing the improvisation I felt that all the stuff I had learnt today had sunk in as I was translating what I learnt and putting it with the movement I did as I went along. Although we learnt set exercises on how to do different lifts today, I felt that we didn’t have to do them full out whilst improvising. With this, I took some of the lifts and improvised with them, so I wasn’t just doing the same things over and over. I think this helped me move more freely in between each movements for example, I felt like this was the first week where there wasn’t a lot of start and stopping between each ‘exercise’ we had learnt from lesson. We could flow from one thing to the next. At the end of the session we got into groups and started to look at questions we wanted to do for our research lab next week.
Readings:
With this weeks reading I have found that it relates a lot to gravity. From reading this chapter I felt it gave me a bit more insight to what we were doing in lesson. In the reading it had a little challenge for us to do, this was to cut a shape out on cardboard and balance it on an end of a pencil. I found this challenging as the shape lost its centre of gravity a lot. When relating this to the practical session it became more clear about gravity and how to hold it when dancing with someone else. Also thinking about this sense of gravity, it gave me a bit more confidence in trusting other people to support me when I became the over dancer. The reading states that ‘the two forces (weight and support) aiming past one another, create torque that turns the body’. This helped me in the jam when people were supporting me when I was the over dancer. The under dancers support and my gravity as the over dancer counterbalanced the lift to make sure it was a stable position. It is like with the exercise with the cardboard where you had to find the centre of gravity and draw an X. When dancing as a pair and one person is the under dancer and the other is the over dancer you soon find where the centre of gravity is, because you become comfortable in the position.