Day 2

I was unable to dance again today but felt that I still gained a lot from the experience of watching the tasks, the choreographic process and working with some of the dancers as they created duets. The first thing I found very interesting was a task where a dancer walked purposefully, while another dancer had their focus on the walking dancer’s feet and followed them with their own feet. I have seen this idea used in the professional work “Inside” by Jean Abreu, and it was good to learn how to do it. The aim for the “follower” being to stay as close to the floor as possible, and to move ‘economically’, that is to say with the least effort. For the “walker”, the aim was to find a purposeful quality of walking, keeping the head up and almost ignoring the other dancer. The development of this idea led to following the walker’s feet with the hands rather than feet, and then led to more dancers following one walker. It was interesting to see how the followers experimented with different ways of moving across the floor quickly. The dance phrase, which was taught yesterday, was very exciting, in terms of choreography, it had a kind of tribal or animalistic feel to it because the movement was quite unnatural in some ways. There wasn’t many movements you could describe using codified dance terminology because it was too unique and unusual, which is of course a very good thing. I think it looked really effective with the whole class doing it at once as it heightened that tribal idea; the movements are quite strong so with the big group of dancers doing it in unison it has a big impact.

The next task was a phrase designed to get the dancers to experiment with the weight of their heads. The phrase involved letting the head be quite heavy and never letting it be in the normal upright position. The development juxtaposed the fastness of the phrase with slow walking, which worked really well. I think the first and the latter task have highlighted the importance of development, that even though you have a really good idea it’s important to work with it further, to experiment and develop the ideas, and to push them as far as you can but still understanding if it works or not.

The duets that were taught next were based on the line between care and control. I found this quite touching, perhaps because of the very close contact of the two bodies, sometimes invasive, and the gestures, which gave the impression of control and were a little sinister. I helped those duets that were being developed by being an “outside eye”, watching their material and giving advice: saying what worked, what didn’t work so well. It was quite strange, and interesting, watching the way people worked together, there were some couples where one dancer was more dominant than the other, and some where both dancers were equally trying to give ideas. It was interesting to see that those couples where one dancer was dominant were getting more done in a shorter space of time because they were spending a lot of time discussing which very ideas to use. Also those who were more active whilst finding ideas seemed to be more experimental in their movement than those who were just standing and discussing. I think this is because, while carrying out their movement ideas and pausing when wondering what to do next, they were able to find out what worked and what didn’t and they could see how one movement was going to link into another.