Before starting today, we each had to take an exercise ball each and find a space within the room. We then went through the patterns of total body connectivity, however each of these exercises had to encorporate the ball. To begin with I found that it was hard to remain connected to the ball at all times and that my balance was often not very stable. However, towards the end of the warm up I felt very confident in myself and some of the harder motions felt relatively easy to me to complete.
We kept the exercise balls with us and in small groups of three of four we created a chain, in between each person was a ball. The people at the front and back had to lean into the chain as appropriate. As a group, we were then instructed to walk around the studio without touching the balls with our hands or dropping them. Slowly we were merged into bigger groups so that by the end the entire class was connected to one another with balls in between each person. This was an important exercise for me because it really made me focus on other people in the group and how we could all work together, whether this meant adapting things that I was doing or allowing others to copy off my movements.
We then put the exercise balls to one side and were asked to find a space within the room where we could work as an individual. Liz then gave us various words such as 'fling', 'rock' and 'whip' for example, and asked us to find ways of acting out these words through our bodies, we performed each word several times to experiment the different ways of interpreting these words at different levels. I found it quite hard to think of a second example on some occasions for the words, but found that some words had endless possibilities attached to them.
We were then asked to merge into groups of three people and select four words from the previous exercise which could be explored further as a group. We chose 'dangle', 'fling', 'press' and 'plummet'. As a group we found ways of performing these actions together and how we could bring individual actions together as a group. Once we had found set actions, we exlpored how to make these bigger, either by adding movements or having varying pace between them and finding ways to make them link between one another. We were then given a set space to perform in and told that any group could enter and perform their sequence at any time but that we were to be mindful of other sequences around us which could influence our pace or movements. I found it very hard to focus on what other groups were doing as I was concentrating on my own actions and being united within my own group.
After this exercise, we were again given a space in which to perform, but this time we were told that only one person from each group could enter the space at any time, this meant that our actions were greatly influenced by the other performers around us as we had to find ways of making our groups actions work as a single person, or by joining someone else.
Finally, we were asked to get into groups of approximately four people and we were told this group would be the one used in our formative assessment at the end of the semester. In this group, we looked at what we had written down from the exercise in the previous week where we remembered our own space. We each selected some key words and combined these together to create a list of emotions and actions.
We were asked to meet up during the week within our groups and create a score for an improvisation which will be performed in the class. We selected rules such as;
*one person in the performance space at all times.
*one person off the performance space at all times.
*to move around whilst out of the space in an emotional state (nervous, excited).
*to have a variety of levels in the space.
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