This week we began by quickly running through the patterns of total body connectivity. This was then followed by completing each of the Makko-Ho stretches, however this week we tried to focus on which areas of the body were being stretched most in the different positions. In order to do this, we sometimes had to complete the stretch multiple times and held these for significanlty longer (which had a greater strain on my body, particularly my legs).
We then worked as a whole class to go through an imporovisation, the score for the first one included moving through the space and then performing any of the Makko-Ho stretches for as long or short a time as we felt like and then moving through the space again for two minutes. After working as a whole group, we were split in half and watched each group's improvisation and noticed several important features such as how each performer seemed influence by the rest of the groups level (for example, as soon as one person completed a stretch on the floor, a lot of the others then moved down to the floor). The performers also moved between stretches at a similar time with a very similar pace. It was very hard to pick out specific individuals from the group.
The second score involved having fifty percent of the performers being in a still position, and the other fifty percent had to find ways of moving through the space, when they came in to contact with a still person they had to explore ways which they could be connected until one person broke off and then the person who was originally still would move and vice versa. This improvisation worked much more effectively as we had specifically looked at these ideas of connections immediately before the performance.
The final score was mainly about the patterns of total body connectivity, each person had to move through the space with a speicifc pattern in mind, we were then to find a motion we liked from someone else, copy it and then make it our own. Sometimes we would take a movement which involved one pattern and then change it so that we were using a totally different pattern of connectivity. I thought this was the best improvisation as there was a lot more freedom in the movements and therefore there was less to think about and the performance became very natural.
After all of these improvisations, we watched part of a documentary called "Force of Nature" which looks at improviser Kirstie Simpson. It was interesting to see how connected the performers were to each other throughout the performance we watched in the video, and also how effective it was to have one performer move away and single themselves out from the group. We therefore, as a group, decided that for our assessment it would be a positive thing to try and include a lot more connection between us and so tried this throughout the week.
No comments:
Post a Comment