Unit 25 - Dance improvisation

Wednesday 16^th November

To start off the dance lesson we carried out a warmup. This consisted of many different physical elements. Firstly, the breathing exercise, when we sink the pelvis into the floor and then pull up. Also having both legs straight and bending and pulling one of the legs in. The last exercise that we did was 4 small jumps and then we dropped down with our legs apart and dipped to one side and then to the other. We repeated this a few times to warmup up the muscles.

After the warmup we had a discussion about what the piece of music that we were dancing to meant and what message it was trying to tell us. It carries a message of how having a friend can make a big difference. We then thought about what friendship meant to us and what we expected in a friendship. We came up with lots of ideas but the one that we were going to focus on was trust. This is because we were going to try some trust exercises which we may add into the dance piece. I went first and I trusted Angel to catch me when I fell back. We started off quite close so the fall wasn’t too big but then we made this bigger gradually. We then tried this the other way around so I was catching Angel. Angel had never done this before and did not like the feeling when she fell back although, after some practice she was able to fall back and I was able to catch her. 

We then moved onto thinking about contact improvisation. For this activity we had to move across the room but we always had to have contact with each other and every step that we made meant that we had to change to point of contact. I found this exercise quite difficult as I have never done anything like this before and found it difficult to think of many different ways to keep in contact. 

After the contact improvisation piece we ran through our piece a few times. We were both able to remember it so we thought about new movements that we could possibly add to the end of the material that we already have. We thought about contact when adding on new moves and came up with a few different possibilities however, we did not make a decision as to which one we would use.