Key practitioners and playing with tone.
“You might want to bring spare T-shirts” – Kirsty Russell
My god did I get my sweat on this week! Usually I’m sweaty by the end of class but rolling around on the floor and running after Becca in the partner exercises had me perspiring like I was filling up a small lake. Not exactly the most attractive way to begin a module! I think starting the class by discovering my contact with the floor and then my contact with someone else helped me to tune into my own senses and highlight what I’m capable of doing and what skills are still in development.
For example, I find it much easier to avoid habitual movements and vary the dynamics of my performance when I’m dancing/working with someone else. When my improvisation is solo I struggle to find innovative ways of using my body and start deciding in my head what type of movement I’ll do next as a means of escaping my conventional pathways. However with a partner I have an obstacle, I have constant change, I have a relationship to explore. My memory of the partner work is brighter than the solo work because my maneuvers were more organic and improvised. Perhaps I need to work on finding that light when it is just me.
In contrast to the light, walking around with my eyes closed, blindly reaching out to my classmates waiting to embrace them was a new experience for me. I expected to have extremely small walks and to be almost afraid but actually I found the task very enjoyable. I liked that I could utilise my other senses to find other meandering people and that when I found someone, we could hug completely and without any awkwardness. This exercise felt quite intimate which I think was an important step for us as a class to take. I wouldn’t think twice now about walking up to someone in a Jam and entwining myself to them, where as before I think I would have.
This week’s readings were Moving from the Skin: An Exploratorium by Dieter Heitkamp and Drafting interior Techniques by Steve Paxton. In Moving from the Skin: An Exploratorium, Heitkamp discusses the skin and how important it is to contact improvisation. She explains that we receive so much information through our skin and that it is a vessel that contains our past experience, good and bad. It is with these functions that the skin is “our primary means of communication and development of meaningful relationships” (Heitkamp, 2003). Our life experiences have an effect on our quality of dance and our range of expression(Heitkamp, 2003). It can be argued therefore that as I have been fortunate to have a relatively positive and easy life that I am open to all types of expression and feel very minor restrictions in my movements. If the skin remembers, then it can remember that I am open to new experiences and therefore open to the challenge of contact improvisation. In her work Heitkamp writes “We can never touch just one thing; we always touch two at the same instant, an object and ourselves” (Heitkamp, 2003), which has stuck with me. This quote reminded me that when we’re improvising with a partner we have to remember how our touch will feel to them, how our intentions will effect them and how their response will affect us. This quote inspires me to always have a purpose and intention when I’m dancing with one or many other people, especially when the contact I give can be given back to me.
Steve Paxton examines the topic of imagery, writing “we do not begin to move from zero … we have a desire or image to launch the system into action” (Paxton, 2003) which I think is very true. For example, this week I took some time to watch people move on the floor, I was interested to see how they used their bodies, especially if they were doing something that I hadn’t done before. Observing people using their shoulders to gain height from the floor was particularly engaging to me as it is something I struggle with. Having witnessed other people achieving movement instigated with their shoulders encouraged me to have a go, and continue to pursue it until I am successful.
Paxton, S. (2003) Drafting Interior Techniques. In: Nancy Stark-Smith (ed) A Subjective History of Contact Improvisation. In: Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (eds) Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 175-184.
Heitkamp, D. (2003). Moving from the Skin: An Exploratorium. Contact Quarterly/Contact Improvisation Sourcebook II, 28(2) 256-264.