Wednesday 30th September- Lesson Two

The rolling point and the interchangeable role of the under and over dancer. 

 “It is the quality of touch rather than the quantity of touch that is of primary importance in our development.” – (Bannon and Holt, 2011, 216)

I wanted to enter this week with a more positive mind set, I expected that we’d be doing more weight bearing work and didn’t want to approach it with premeditated negativity. Starting class with a basic exercise of pulling people up from the floor helped me to feel more comfortable with giving my weight to people. I found it very reassuring that  everyone  was confidant with solely bringing a person up to standing. In this weeks reading the authors write that how we are touched teaches us how to define boundaries in response to sensory information(Bannon and Holt, 2011, 216); both the pulling someone from the floor exercise and trailing a partner to find points of contact was useful for me in understanding this idea. It was easier to respond to my partner’s contact when the touch was driven by purpose and intent. Bannon and Holt also describe that in dance the touch that is most interesting is “touch that stimulates awareness, excites curiosity and increases a facility to form accessible active knowledge” (Bannon and Holt, 2011, 216), which explains why touch is so important to contact improvisation.

Although I’m beginning to allow myself to trust my classmates, I was quite resistant to give them my weight in the under and over duets. However by the end of the session, and especially the end of the contact jam, I felt more comfortable in fully releasing my weight to another person, and actually am finding the duets quite fun. If I were to summarise my struggles with this week it would be ‘trusting other people’ but I don’t want to dwell on this too much; my reservations aren’t holding me back from attempting anything in class so I don’t need to give to much attention to them. Perhaps with enough practice I won’t have any hesitancy and will throw myself doubt-free into an improvisation.

Creating contact frames is something I have done before so I feel more confidant being the frame than the person making contact. I don’t think I’m the only one to feel this way, as when this was done as a group activity everyone that made contact with me was reserved about how much weight they released control over. I found this almost frustrating as I knew I could take all their weight, I just needed them to trust me (the irony here is ridiculous!) I hoping that we’ll have more time to work on these structures so that we can go in and out of them with ease in future jams.

I’m unsure how to strengthen my connections with people, is it something that will come in time, or is there something I can actively do? I’m also interested in working on making a smoother transition from improvising to contact work; maybe if I put more of my own weight into my hands, and not always being in a standing position, I might move into contact work more easily.


Bannon, F. and Holt, D. (2011) Touch: Experience and Knowledge. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 3(1&2) 215-225.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *