Month: November 2017

This week was a little different for me as I was observing the session, not taking part. Although I did not want to just watch the session it was interesting to be able to see other people move through the space and how they create connections with each other. The strongest connections were formed when participants were moving with their friends compared to with the people they are not as close with. I think this was only because of how comfortable they were with friends and they already have trust and care for each other’s bodies. There were some interesting moments within peoples work, one of these being Kye and Laura C. They kept momentum throughout their improvisation and experimented with how they could transfer weight between each other.

One of the tasks showed which people in the class wanted to be the hierarchy when in pairs, I think this says a lot about contact, in the sense that as a group we need to come to terms with an equality between 2 bodies and show that roles are interchangeable within the practice. I know personally this is an issue for me as I prefer to be the under dancer, taking peoples weight and being in control of the situation. This is because I don’t feel comfortable about giving someone all my weight. It is not a lack of trust for my partner, it is a lack of trust for myself in that situation. This reflects on my dance training as I have always been the male role of lifting within performance, so I feel I am not able to be lifted.

We also looked briefly at the Nancy Stark Smith Underscore in preparation for our assessment, I am slightly confused about this at the moment but hopefully watching the set video and researching in more depth with make it clearer, however I am looking forward to integrating this into my practice in the future.

The jam this week was one of my favourite so far! I felt that I really pushed myself with exploring new ways to keep contestant connection and a momentum. I worked best when I had my eyes closed, this is because I tuned into my other sensations such as; skin on skin contact and how that made me feel/ how it influenced my movements, listening to my partners body and tuning it to how they are feeling in that moment. I also forgot about how aesthetic my movements looked at the time and concentrated on the feel of them and how they flowed. I worked with Laura C for the first time in this jam and we came up with some exciting ways to take one lift into another, she was very mobile and not afraid of what might have happened if something went wrong which helped me to feel more confident too.

Contact Improvisation has been a rollercoaster journey for me, some weeks I felt I was doing amazing and other weeks I felt that I was never going to grasp the concept of CI. However, saying that I have developed many skills practicing this module and learnt a lot about my own body that I didn’t know before. For example, I know that my body is constantly moving and never stops thanks to reading about and practicing Steve Paxton’s ‘Small Dance’. As a group we have learnt to be sensitive to each other’s bodies when working together, and to listen to each other through movement. Personally, I feel that this will aid us in many other modules that the course has to offer, because we now know more about how we all move individually and together, we know when to place weight onto each other or when to stop a movement in case of injury.

I made some great connections with people I did not think possible because I am not close with them outside of the studio. This comes back to Week 2’s blog where I talk about proprioception, and it is about sensing when to put weight onto your partner or reacting to their stimuli. I feel that I have become better at this as the semester has gone on, especially with people I struggled to move with at the beginning. El was one of these people, but I feel that the more we worked together we were able to find momentum in our movements because we knew each other’s limits.

The aspect that hindered me the most throughout the weeks of learning Contact Improvisation was my fear of the unknown, as previously mentioned in Week 3 when talking about the reading ‘Beginning, Approaching, Practicing, Dancing’ (Paek, S. M, 2015). Some questions that emerged from this reading were;

How long will you be working together?
How intimate of frightening will the task be?
Will you feel comfortable?
What will you have to do?

These questions still cross my mind when practicing CI, but now I do not try and answer them mentally but just emerge myself in what is being asked of us and the questions will be answered naturally. I still have a fear of the unknown and I do not think that will go away but I can now control how much this affects me and how it can benefit me within my practice.

In Week 4 I wrote a few questions about Steve Paxton’s ‘Small Dance’. One of them being “Is there such thing as complete stillness?” My answer now would be no, for a couple of reasons, one being that whilst practicing CI you would lose momentum if you were to have complete stillness between bodies. The second is that the body can never be fully still, internally your organs are still functioning causing your ribcage and various other body parts to move, this is creating reflexes, whether you are aware of them or not. Within the CI practice it is important to be aware of these and to be able to react to them through movement. I do not feel that we are in control of our reflexes, rather our body is reacting to sensations we feel, whether this is through touch, sound or sight.

The ‘Sensing Weight in Movement’ (Ravin, Susanne, 2010) reading where it talks about the senses being a function of how we move, and our inner sensations are to be understood, meaning that our body moves as one and we are constantly receiving information from all our senses, we just don’t always pay attention to all of them. Finally, our senses tell us how we feel about situations we have been presented with. Senses are one of the most important aspects in learning CI, I feel that without the senses how would you know what movements to do or if you were injuring your partner. I feel that they are most obvious in the lead and follow exercise that we do most weeks. This exercise awakens the senses ready for the rest of the class as you are relying solely on your partner to guide you through the space.

Going up was my favourite week, I feel that working with Georgia who gave me all her trust allowed me to fully engage in the lifts we were learning. Even though one of our lifts did not work out how we wanted it to and we both ended up falling on the floor we still trusted each other afterwards. I think this is because as we were falling I never let go of Georgia and made sure that I was not just going to drop her to make sure I did not get injured. She made me feel confident in being able to take all her weight. I think this was the week where I felt that I wasn’t that bad at CI and I just needed to take what I had done in that week’s lesson into the following weeks.

I have loved CI despite the ups and downs and I think it has had a huge impact on my dance training in general. I feel that we need to carry on these sessions in the future as they will prepare us for when we leave university. I feel confident in my skills that I have acquired and can not wait to apply them to other modules through out my dance training.

 

Bibliography

Paek, S M. (2015) Beginning, Approaching, Practicing, Dancing. Contact Quarterly, Vol 40: 1,pp. 36.

Brown, B. (1997) Is Contact a Small Dance? Contact Improvisation Sourcebook I, 6, 72-75.

Ravn, S. (2010) Sensing weight in movement. Journal of Dance & Somatics, 2 (1) 21-34.