This week when I arrived I felt slightly ill and so decided to observe from the side and took notes. The group started by warming up, this week the warm up was not focused on one particular area but instead used almost the entire body at different stages. The variety in the warm ups was also unusual, Liz had the group going from rocking gently one moment to stamping their feet and moving the next. It was great to see moments of great contrast.
Following this, the group completed a Qigong exercise from earlier in the semester where they had to create a balloon of energy between their arms and chest, it was stretched and moved and manipulated before gathering the energy and pulling into their centre.
The next exercise was really physical, whenever Liz was moving, everyone else also had to be moving, when Liz was still, everyone else had to be still. This was to increase the awareness of how other's were performing in the space around them. It was interesting to watch as people fed off the energies of others throughout the exercise. The use of levels in particular was notable as when one person decided to move lower to the ground, there was a moment where almost half the group went from standing to a crouching position.
This was then repeated in pairs, it looked a lot harder to focus on your partner when so much was happening in the space around you, but also easier as there was really only one person who you had to be aware of. As Dougie and Esther were working close to me, I observed them in a bit more detail. I noticed that they would often mirror one another when moving, and they took turns in leading the movement. Liz then changed the rules of the improvisation so that only one person in the pair was allowed to move at any one time, so when one stopped the other started. This appeared to make it easier to be aware of moments when the partner decided to stop or move, but because only one person was moving, there was less energy to feed off from their partner and so sometimes because repetitive.
Holding onto each other's hips and trying to break away through the space was repeated as previously experimented in earlier weeks. Liz told us all this time to focus on freeing the chest (I think because this is what predominantly leads the movement). This was another great moment of contrast, the exercise had went from a relatively peaceful exercise into one full of energy and power. It was really effective one again for me as an audience member.
The group were then asked to move through the space, one side of the room to the other, in group of three using their spines and centres of gravity. Things to note from this were the use of proximity between the performers and the moments of stillness or speed. There were some great moments where groups worked to mirror each other or work against one another to emphasise the contrast.
Logomotion was also explored, however Liz asked the group to stand in complete stillness upon finishing the exercise, the contrast once again was very powerful. The stillness was very dramatic alongside the very manic and full on logomotion. I noticed that during the first time of performing that a lot of people committed a lot of energy in the beginning but it became less and less as the performance went on. It was good to watch the silent section and see how the body can be used to really transfer their words into images. During the second time of performing, the stillness was a lot more focused, this had such an impact on the performance, before there were a lot of little distractions and it didn't really feel like a moment of stillness. As well as being more focused, I felt like the group took on board Liz's advice on what posture to adopt for the standing. The third time of performing the transitions between the different stages of logomotion were quite fluent and it was less obvious that there was a thought process involved.
We were told that these exercises were going to form a lot of the summative assessment at the end of April, I was pleased to hear this as I feel there is a good chance for me to improve on skills I have already started to develop during this semester. I am starting to see the importance of all the different exercises we do on a weekly basis.
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