Unit 25 - Dance improvisation

Wednesday 21st September

The aim of this lecture was to start exploring different factors that affect dance improvisation. In this lesson specifically, we were focusing on the lyrics and music that influence us when we are improvising a piece. We started the lecture with a gentle warm up. This warm up consisted of a few exercises that we had carried out in the previous week and then also some new exercises. Firstly we started by loosening up the body with some shoulder and hip rolls. Then, we moved onto the breathing exercise which we carried out the week before. This was when we brushed the backs of our hands along the floor as we breathed in and then as we breathed out, we rolled our hands down and clicked after every roll. We then did some gentle stretches with the legs by putting the soles of our feet together and trying to bring them in as far as possible. 

For the next part of the lesson we focused on and got our first feel for dance improvisation. The activity that we were given was to find 4 different points on the floor and at each of these points we would have to pick a dance motif. We would hold this position for a few seconds and then move to the new spot where we would create our second motif and so on. Once we had practiced this through a few times, Laura chose a piece of music for us to move to. As we heard the music, our movements slightly changed to fit the beat and the emotion of the music. When we started getting the hang of this, we slowly started to think more carefully about the transitions from one motif to the next. This activity will help us later in the year as we will be creating our own dance pieces and this is just a starting point of creating our own small sequences. Once we had completed this activity once and had showed the rest of the class what we had created and developed, we tried the exercise again, however this time we used 4 different spots within the space, different moves and different music. In total we did this 3 times with 3 different types of music. This meant that we could explore many different types of music and get a feel of different types of music and lyrics. The 3 different types of music that we used were very different and contrasting. This meant that we had to think about what sort of transitions would fit with each different style of music. I found this exercise moderately easy as I have had dance experience in the past but I also found this hard as I haven’t covered dance improvisation before.