This week’s reading WHATS THE SCORE? By Maura Keefe was very confusing to get my head around. I understood the relation to dance improvisations and baseball. It spoke about how improvisation doesn’t have a set of rules but it has scores and how improvisation then has a structure to follow. It relates contact improvisation to the technique of the bowler when the bowler begins to bowl the ball. It states ” he dropped his weight way back onto his back leg” this as dancers we see as a form of technique its structure but the way he does this is improvised. As everything we do in life is a form of improvisation.
In class today our first partner work exercise we did was a simple lead and follow exercise, something we have covered in lesson before but we revisited with different people. As there was an odd number in class I was with a three for this with both Laura and Jess. Me and jess found it so difficult to both be leading one person as we were both trying to determine the way we wanted Laura to go but of course there was two of trying to direct her so there for it seemed to be a bit all over the place. It was also very hard when we switched places as Laura then had to lead both me and Jess at the same time, to make this easier and safe she decided to wrap her arms around me and Jess instead of placing them on our lower backs we therefor knew what directions she wanted us to go in. Because Laura was leading two of us sometimes the pressure she wanted in my right side she would also do to jess which we would then sometimes collide and bump into each other at some points. At the begging of this when she started with the hands on our backs walking I had anxiety as I knew her job was harder.
Did I trust her?
When she then turned to cupping around our waist my anxiety went and I began to then trust her. It was great to see the use of the hierarchy nature used and thinking of the equality of all of our bodies. We then developed the following and leading into movements where our partners would touch a part of our body or do something to initiate movement. Our partners were encouraged to touch different parts of the body and apply different pressures to different parts, she had initiate different and out of the ordinary movements to get us out of our habitual movements that we would normally do. I was still with Laura for this, somebody I have never worked with in contact before which was really helpful has her body moves very different to mine. Just the way Laura touched my body parts and the different body parts I had never thought somebody would have touched, for example my fingers and the side of my body. Just simply using her fingertip gently gave me a completely different sensation to when I had done it before in class with somebody else. It made me explore different movements and really release my body and stop my normal and habitual movement I tend to do. My experience was so different in this exercise than it had been before or in any other exercises we had done like this, I really enjoyed working with Laura and I feel like I learnt a lot from this.
For the last part of the lesson we were trying more going up lifts for example one I did with Jess was the arm to arm shoulder lift. This was a really hard lift very mentally challenging for both me and the under dancer. For this we decided that having spotters was the best option to keep everybody safe especially the over dancer as I was flipping over Jesses shoulder. With the help from Kirsty we did manage to get this lift once but the second time we tried this with the spotters’ jess had her sense of gravity in the wrong place and she actually fell backward with me in the air on top of her shoulder and fell onto the floor. With this lift sharing the sense of gravity and having our sense of gravity in the correct place was a really important. The placement of where I held onto jess and where she grabbed me was very important so we didn’t hurt each other. The main thing for me being the over dancer was to not hold any muscular tension but be able to hold my body in the correct place to help the momentum of Jess lifting me.
Bibliography
Keffe, M. What’s the score? In Albright, A.C,& Gere, D.(2003) Taken by surprise: A dance improvisation reader. Middletown, Conneticut: Wesleyan University press. Pp 223-235.