Unit 25 - Dance improvisation

Wednesday 28^th September

The aim of this lecture was to continue looking at the different factors that affect dance improvisation. 

To start the session, our lecturer took us outside onto the grass area just outside the building. We stood in the middle of the grass and we were asked “what does this remind you of?” This reminded me of walking my dog through the park back at home because you could just about hear the cars on the nearby road and he birds in the sky. Once we had thought about what this reminded us of, we thought of the emotions coming with it. The emotion that I felt was sadness and homesickness. Once we had headed back inside, Laura asked us what sorts come into our minds when we were given an emotion. She firstly asked us what makes us feel calm. Between me and my friend Angel, we came up with a list of many things which make us calm including a tidy room, clean bedding, peaceful music, family/friends and a log fire. On the other hand, we were then asked to think of things which made us stressed or uneasy. For this, we said things such as tension between family or friends, homesickness and falling behind with work. These thoughts and emotions will be very useful to us as we experiment with different dance styles. We will use these emotions throughout the year when experimenting with dance improvisation. 

After thinking about all of these emotions, we decided to put these into practice by physically showing these emotions through body language. Because we weren’t doing too much physical movement today, we did not need to carry out a warmup. This meant that we saved time in the lesson so we could spend more time on the main activity. The main activity of this lesson was to think about emotions in which we will be able to use within our dance pieces. We started off the activity by walking around the room in neutral position whilst there was some music playing quietly in the background. After a few minutes, we were given a situation in which we had to imagine we were in. This meant that we had to physically act and change our body language. The first situation that we were given was that we were in a very hot desert walking across some very hot sand but we had a very heavy load on our backs. To demonstrate this, I took small steps and I was hunched over. Another situation that we were given was that we were lead in bed with our cosy pyjamas on watching our favorite programme on TV. At this point the music changed so that it was much calmer. At first I found this activity quite difficult as I wasn’t thinking emotionally about the situation but as the task went on, I began to bring my emotions into it. 

This lecture was very useful to me as it helped me to think about different emotions and how we can use these within dance to improve the piece.