Tuesday’s Class

 

We started this week with a somatic exercise, which led into moving round in our lower kinesphere, twisting and rolling to find non-habitual movements. During this exercise, I started to remove myself away from habitual movement, and began to explore the concept of swinging and making circles with my body. I started to play with the speed of the swings and rolls and how the momentum can affect my movement. I started to feel a lot more confident within myself, rebounding of the other bodies instead of stopping my movements and moving into a different space. As I confident within my movement I started to close my eyes, “consciousness might even be bypassed; improvisers migh0t ‘sink past the conscious mind into more appropriate states” (Paxton, 2010, 131), I feel as though I bypassed my conscious mind whilst my eyes were closed focusing more within my internal body, the muscles within my toes and how they were moving, forming movements from there.
Moving into working with partners, holding each other’s heads as we moved, to start with I struggled to fully release my head, and I found myself repeating the same movements. I explored mainly my higher kinesphere, mainly because I worried about explore my middle and lower kinesphere.
I also struggled to choose my own pathways and not follow the way that Sophie was leading head, as well as I struggled to keep myself from leading Sophie’s pathways as it was hard to guess which was she was going to move.
I have however found during this exercise, which I started to explore more during the improvisation jam on Thursday, to release my neck and head into the bodies.
I started to let them carry the weight of my head and started to explore the movement that this created.

This exercise moved into head connection, the movement that me and Sophie created whilst exploring this exercise really surprised me because I never really understood the phrase ‘let two bodies become one’ until this exercise.
As we started to connect through other body parts and we started to explore over and under dancer, I started to close my eyes and just let the connection between mine and Sophie’s body parts lead my movement.
As we started to walk around the space, focusing completely on the floor and what space we were going to walk towards, I started to feel as though my whole body had embedded into my eyes, that only reason my body was moving forward was because my eyes were willing my body to move.
My body started to response to what it saw and at this time the sense of sight in my body was heightened.

As we moved into making eye contact with the other bodies within the space and creating movement, I worked with Fenya and we started to play with how far we could go, still keeping the eye contact, and how close we could go, moving round in a circle shoulder to shoulder. It really helped me especially within the improvisation jam, as I used it to initiate movement, following the eye contact and then moving into something from that. I felt that sense of conversation between the eyes.

“Dancers taught the roll in a western way (to achieve external form alone) tended to reproduce habitual actions associated with the performance of a forward roll/somersault, rather than the aikido roll” (Paxton, 2010, 125) whilst we were learning the aikido roll, this quote was right at the front of my head. To my it is something that I could see in myself, I started to convert back to more of a contemporary style roll rather than the aikido roll, which would have made me struggle when we started to proceed the roll from standing, I had to take the roll very slowly to begin with and concentrate fully on what part of my body was moving when.
Thursday’s Improvisation Jam

 

This week’s improvisation jam, felt to me a little more difficult than last week, I feel like I struggled a lot within the weight baring, as I wasn’t too sure on how to initiate it or how to really do this with my partner. I also felt with the music being slower and more relaxed that it was harder to put yourself back into the improvisation jam, and I started to realise how hard it is to work within a group larger than two within contact improvisation.
“The dancer feels anxious, thinks judgmental, self-deprecating thoughts, recalls previous experiences of humiliation, gets scared of other people’s judgement, and in response often initiates habitual (usually recognizable) movement forms” (Paxton, 2010, 132)
Whilst reflecting on the improvisation jam after class and whilst re-reading parts of Paxton’s “Interior techniques”  I started to realise that my problem is more within myself than the actual concept of the ‘jam’, I seem to struggle with the idea of not being as good as my partner or getting stuck and not really knowing where to go with it, again leaving my partner without anywhere to go, this idea of not being good enough I feel holds my back and stops me from exploring my whole movement as well exploring more of the jam.
This is something I determined to work on and improve by the end of the module so I can reach and go beyond my full potential.

Bibliography –

Steve Paxton’s “Interior Techniques”: Contact Improvisation and Political Power. Full Text Available By: Turner, Robert. TDR: The Drama Review, Fall2010, Vol. 54 Issue 3, p123-135, 13p, 5 Black and White Photographs