Sharing Gravity and (out of) Balance – Off the floor, Awareness, Disorientation and Letting Go.
“Practice, practice, practice”
I think the last time I was able to make and hold a handstand position was in year 4, me and my friends would stand in a circle on the field and sing a chant about the rugrats characters before throwing ourselves forward with ease into a handstand, not caring if our summer dresses fell down to our waists. Now a days going upside down doesn’t come quite as easily to me. When we were first told to go into a handstand or cartwheel my instant reaction was ‘lol no’ but actually, even though I struggle to get my hips up, I can feel that with each days practice I’m getting slightly more height and holding it for a millisecond longer than the last attempt. To hold these upside down positions efficiently I know I need to increase my upper body strength, specifically in my arms, and continue to work on lifting my hips and engaging my core.
When I think about my practice this week I keep coming back to the movements that I use to initiate contact with another person. In most cases I will use my arms to guide or wrap around my partner, and basically apply the ‘thick skin’ technique, but with more physical contact. I would like to focus on using bigger gestures, or more direct movements to begin contact; I started playing with this idea in the CI jam, because there were more of us, there were more opportunities to enter the space with the intention of using someone to make a balance position, or give my weight to them, where as when it is one on one, I feel the need to make a connection with them before any specific contact work. Perhaps once we start working in the upper kinesphere I will find it easier to avoid wrapping arm gestures?
In preparation for this week we read Is Contact a Small Dance? by Byron Brown and Sensing Weight in Movement by Susanne Ravn. I found these articles a little confusing but from what I did understand they have been very useful to me in understanding my own CI practice a little better. In Is Contact a Small Dance? Byron Brown states that “We learn to use our bodies in necessary and efficient ways in order to relate to our environment and a moving partner” (Brown, 1997, 73), which has explained to me why some days my practice feels better than others. CI is heavily influenced, I think, on who you’re working with and the environment of that relationship; if one of you is pre-occupied or stressed, self-conscious, tired, or irritated, then that is going to have an impact on how present you can be in the space, and how much effort and attention you can give to your partner. I have experienced this first hand, last week I was not solely focused on the improv’ jam and felt that I couldn’t connect to the group; whereas this week I gave all my attention to the jam and as a result I could enter and exit the space and still be able to find a connection with people. Obviously, fluctuating between being in and out of the space has its own difficulties and that is something I aim to work on more next week, but as a direct comparison between weeks 3 & 4, this week was much more settled and comfortable.
In her article Sensing Weight in Movement Ravn mentions that for some dancers “the sense of weight…is related to a sense of giving up control of movement to let the body be connected to gravity” (Ravn, 2010, 24). This got me thinking that perhaps I’m still hesitant to give my weight to someone, not because it’s a personal hang up, but because it is me releasing control, which is something I don’t like to do. Usually in an improvisation, I will be one of the people to enter the space with a new idea, or with the intention of starting something different. ‘An Instigator’ if you will. I like this role because I have control over that idea, I have control over its structure, its purpose and when its achieved its goal I know that I helped to do that. Maybe it’s more of an ego thing than a control thing, but in any case, that’s what I like to do. I will try to push myself into joining an already formed idea or being a part of the team instead of the leader, but if I feel like that’s not working out for me, then this is my default. I’m hoping that now this idea has been highlighted I can give more focus to releasing that control, as well as weight, and enjoy being a part of the process and not thinking about the product.
This week saw the start of our first Research Lab, we had to write down all our questions and thoughts about CI and pick two that we wanted to focus on. My group chose the questions “How do we incorporate eye contact” and “How can we clarify intent”. We felt that these were the most prominent to us personally as when we watched the videos of our contact practice these were the things we felt were lacking. The aim for our ‘eye contact’ exercises is to strengthen the connection between make physical contact at the same time as eye contact; and for our ‘intent’ exercises we hope to clarify that we’re all a lot stronger than we give each other credit for, and to discuss whether it is more effective for the under or over dancer to decide when to move out of a balance position. I’m particularly interested to see the results of our ‘intention’ exercises, as I struggle with knowing how long to hold a balance position, and whether the under dancer was intending to hold it for a longer/shorter time than me.
Brown, B. (1997) Is Contact a Small Dance? Contact Quarterly: Contact Improvisation Sourcebook, 1(6) 72-75.
Ravn, S. (2010) Sensing Weight in Movement. Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 2(1) 21-34.