We watched two videos at the start of this week’s session, revisiting the idea of the over and under dancer and watching more examples of anchors and leavers.
Investigation #1 with Martin Keogh and Neige Christenson, in this video the male was more dominant, using his body more as the under dancer, working with a lot less momentum.
They found stillness quite often and found weight baring lifts to use this stillness in and balance, they’re work seemed effortless almost as if the movement had been choreographed.
Comparing Keogh and Christenson’s work to the work of Mäkinen & Akkanen, I recognised more variety of movement, with the female offering platforms for the male. They created riskier weight baring lifts and explored more throughout this idea of platforms and jigsaw pieces slotting together. They had constant body connection, which I don’t think Keogh and Christenson had all the time, using anchors and leavers, rolling points and platforms.
We started practically walking around the space, thinking about releasing into the floor using our breath. Taking it in turns to say ‘3,2,1’ and trusting the other bodies in the space to catch us as we released our bodies into the floor. During this task I focused on releasing the muscular tension through my legs and mainly my thighs as I have realised this is where I hold a lot of my tension when trying ‘release’.
We spent the rest of the session exploring ways of ‘going up’ using different kineaspheres, lifting from the floor, to table top and then to standing and jumping lifts.
We started off body surfing, and making sure the connection is kept between the two bodies and then exploring how we could take the body surfing into a table top weight bare.
This is something I really struggled to explore, as I felt the connection between the two bodies disappear and we stopped releasing into each others bodies. After exploring it further with other bodies in the space, it still didn’t get any easier. Am I not releasing my body? Am I not fixing the right points in my body to create the idea of a jigsaw? I am not making full connection to start with? As I started to question myself as I was exploring this exercise I started to notice that instead of working with the other body, I tend to place myself into the ‘right’ position and then release and carry on, meaning the connection was lost and my body had tense up, I started to release it wasn’t the transition from the floor to table top to standing that was going wrong for me, I had lost the connection and the release before I had even started to think about the transitions. This is something I wont to explore and work with within class next week and it will always be something that I think about during contact.
Jam
This week I felt was a turning point for me in the jam, I felt my confidence levels grow in a matter of minutes. I thought about all the my questions and queries I had from the lesson and took this into the jam with me, making sure when I started within connecting with other bodies I thought about releasing and keeping the connection especially through the weight baring lifts.
Through doing this I felt the weight baring lifts were easier than in class, I felt confident in taking some up or letting myself be taken up, I also started to play around with the transitions between the floor, table top and standing, it was only baby steps, but it has made me feel a lot more confident to use these new skills more often with other bodies in the space.
Bibliography
Neige Christeneon(2009) The play of weight. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltq6y06E8ew accessed 8 November 2016].
Omegabranch (2011) Contact improvisation Mirva Makinen and Otto Akkanen. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMLbWxujoGw [accessed 8 November 2016].