This week was very strange, it was my first assessed performance at university and I was really feeling nervous. I found it really hard to focus on my exercises and was always anticipating what would be happening next. From the very beginning, where we warmed up, this time all of the classes were brought together as one large group, I think this added to my already nervous state. I am usually alright when I perform, I think the fact that it was labelled as an assessment had an impact on me. During the warm up, because of the amount of people in the room and the fact that I could hardly even see what was happening towards the front, I struggled to warm up as I had previously done. This was a good experience, and I know now what to expect going into an assessment.
After completing our stretches, we then went straight into our performances, each group completed their improvised scenes which lasted for approximately three minutes. I felt like my group had a great deal of variety between us, but we also had moments where our movements echoed one another. Each of us brought a unique style to the group, and it was a good opportunity to take elements of movement from other people and convey those in my own way. It was also good to watch how other groups decided to perform their improvisations, the different scores that each group had created and the amount of different styles chosen from the same set of instructions.
Following on from this part of the assessment, Liz allowed us the opportunity to enter the space in the middle of the room whenever we felt like it. I enjoyed this part of the assessment, it was good to see how different people reacted to working in a group with people they may never have seen before that day. Again, the performance was completely improvised, I had a moment where I worked with someone I had never seen before but it worked very well and both of us worked with each other to share our weight. It was hard to know when to enter the space as the performance seemed to have only two stages, everyone entered at once, or everyone left at once. This is something that I will have to consider in future performances as I do not want to become too orchestrated or predictable.
Throughout the whole assessment, I tried to remember and apply the patterns of total body connectivity, especially the breath, as this is something we have worked on so regularly I knew it would be an important element. I really made an effort to include aspects from each pattern at different points to show my versatility and also the knowledge which I have gained throughout this first semester.
Over the next few weeks away from university I hope to continue practising some of the exercises from the movement module ready for when we return in January. I am also hoping to get a bit more reading done from the reading materials, exploring not only the essential reading but also some of the extras in order to broaden my new-found knowledge within movement.
