Monday 13th October 2014 – Formative Assessments 1 and 2
In today’s lesson we looked at a range of exercises and how they related to the readings and to our body’s kinesphere. In the movement activities we mainly did partner work so for the first exercise we did we were working on our own. We looked at standing in parallel position and closing our eyes. Now at the beginning of the class we looked at Steve Paxton’s small dance video. The small dance means it is mainly an internal dance so its mainly the organs that are moving inside. We stood for a good five minutes just to connect our minds to our bodies. Whiles the eyes were shut, I could definitely feel some movement happening in the body and I think I swayed back and forward a lot, not dramatically, but there was a sense of swaying involved. Once establishing the small dance, we then played with this idea of letting gravity pull our weight somewhere in the space and not reacting to it but letting our body go with the suspense/movement. When letting gravity take us on a movement, you have to be sure you are relaxed and have your knees bent a bit. After getting used to this sense of being pulled through the space by gravity, we then went on to do more stuff with this sense of gravity being the bigger force. We were still letting ourselves be pulled by gravity but this time we had to let the gravity pull us all the way to the floor so in other terms we shouldn’t stop ourselves from falling to the floor. During the exercise l couldn’t let myself fall forward to the floor because I was scared of the way I would land. For this exercise and in contact improvisation, for myself, I have to tell the voice in my head to let the barriers down and to be confident in myself to do the majority.
Moving onto the next exercise, this was in partners. We had to hold one hand of each other and run. However, one person would take the lead first and have to drag the other partner around the space by using their own sense of gravity to lead their initiation of movement. We then switched roles and we both became the lead so we were interchanging roles. After a short break, we cam back to our same partner and started a new task. With this one we were learning ways to transfer weight onto another body. To understand it more, we used the terms cat and cat owner. The first time I was the cat owner and I just stood there and moved into stable positions so the car could move around me and give me their weight. We then swapped over. Once feeling comfortable with this sense of movement, we then became interchangeable between these two roles (cat and cat owner). This exercise was nice to do as I had never worked with Stacie before so it was nice to move away from my usual partners and get to know someone else. I have to say it has made me feel more confident in working with other people I don’t really know so well. At first when starting the exercises we both felt a bit hesitant, we thought this could be due to us being new partners. Neither of us knew each other’s boundaries/weight limitations. Once we got into it, the more fluid it became and the easier it was to move. When we did the interchangings, we felt we went to the floor a lot, feeling more grounded. Together we felt we could do more stable positions/lifts. As the flowness was going well through the task, I felt we weren’t starting and stopping like we were in the first two exercises. We had constant movement towards the end. And again, in my opinion it helped by shutting off that voice in the back of the head, making my body make the decisions for me.
Ready for the research lab next week, we got into our groups, discussing what questions we want to research in next week’s lesson. Our two questions are:-
1. How can you use other body parts as effectively as your chest and back?
2. How many stable positions can we actually get into?
Questions 1 and 2:
How easy is it to give someone your weight when you’re conscious you’ve never worked with them?
What is the difference between giving someone your weight and taking someone’s weight?
How do you become comfortable interchanging partners with different weights?
Magnesium – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FeSDsmIeHA
Video – Steve Paxton – The Small Dance – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sJKEXUtv44
Steve Paxton’s small dance is a movement picture of a skeleton. The small dance is the inner movement we have in our body so when you watch from the frontal view, you can see the hands twitching slightly and the thighs also doing the same. There is also a slight twist in the ribs/torso, meaning the alignment is off centre. Although these are minor movements, these are what count as “small dance”. When viewing from the side you could see the thighs engaging, helping the body very slightly rocking back and forth. Looking from the top angle (bird’s eye view) you can see the head very minorly nodding. From the feet looking up (worm’s eye view) you can see the hands/arms moving a bit. All these minor movements make up the small dance. Thinking about this idea of small movements and the inner movement, the organs and nervous system could be part of this dance, seeing as those two things are working to keep us breathing and alive. This video relates back to the very first exercise I talked about, standing still with eyes closed, seeing where gravity takes us. When standing in neutral position, I could feel my weight in my body moving back and forth. This could be because gravity is pulling my body away and my body is balancing out the weight equally. Also it is trying to make me feel more grounded on the floor. And I had a few twitches in my hands as well. This helped me learn that even stillness isn’t really still because there is always something within us that is moving slightly.
Readings:
In Steve Paxton’s Magnesium (1972) he stated “is to discover, through spontaneous movement in contact”. He then goes on to say “there is no set choreography, no specific instruction”. In this sentence I can relate it back to the gravity pulling exercise. Mainly because in that exercise you should just let go of tension and see where gravity takes you, whereas I was thinking to myself where I could catch my weight if needed, was scared of falling and crashing. In the article ‘sensing weight in movement’ Susane Raun talks about 4 different techniques (ballet, contemporary, body-mind centering and butch dance). All four genres have different ways of using gravity and mass to sense where to distribute their weight evenly. For example, a ballet dancer will have to use their weight by pulling up through the centre, whereas a contemporary dancer would need to have more range of movement in the torso.
Wednesday 15th October 2014
In the jam today I was challenging myself to work with different people and to initiate movement. Through the course of the jam I felt more relaxed then I have been in the past jams. This could be because we had more variety of movement due to the Monday classes. Also the darkness helps me get into the right frame of mind, I feel more awake and free in my movement, like no one can judge me. When starting the movement I became more aware of who was around me and went back to my old habits, going back to people I feel more comfortable with. Once I became more relaxed and into the mood of things I started my challenge of initiating movement with people. I have to say although I could find it easy initiating movement I was scanning the room a lot of the time to see who I hadn’t worked with yet. Despite that glitch of planning where to go next I felt I moved with a lot more people then I would usually work with (worked with the majority of the class). This on its own has given me a confident boost knowing there is nothing to be scared about when working with people you don’t really know so well.