This session started off viewing videos of other people’s contact improvisation practices. The video was the students of Roehampton University exploring contact improvisation in a familiar way to how we study here. Although the students in the video have been practising Contact Improvisation for slightly longer than me, I can relate to the practice from watching. The rawness of their movement and experimentation shown gives me a confidence that what I create during a contact jam, or what I explore in class, is positive and that I am on the right track considering I am only at the beginning of exploring this practise.
The platforms and frames the dancers create are often imaginative and open, giving their partner a variety of options to explore how and where to make a connection with their partner’s body. At 0.27 seconds, two male dancers attempt to make a connection on a high kinsephere that was unusual and experimental and didn’t seem to be ‘successful’. However this proved interesting to me because before this I wouldn’t have thought of using this position as a frame, as either role of under or over dancer. Without the amount of momentum used to make contact with the dancer in the frame, how the over dancer was connected to the over dancer could have been explored much more; although this exploration was short in the video, it suggests room to discover I wider range in movement that I could explore in my own practice as higher lifts are something I usually avoid. The way the dancers keep a connection with each other is also interesting and proved something to what I practice myself. Using hands and arms to maintain a connection with another body is an instinct and something I notice myself and others practicing in class and jams. Though in this video, the dancers used the side of their bodies and under their armpits to ensure the connection does not break. Overall, this seemed to create and easier and available platform for the dancers to use and go back to, allowing them to always move together and explore something which could be initiated, rather than keeping a connection through hands then having to find a wat to initiate a conversation again, which would have a similar effect to losing the connection in the first place. Breath is something I often loose concentration with whilst improvising as I subconsciously focus on what is happening with my own body and trying to ensure that myself and my partner remains safe. However this video shows the dancer’s clear use of breath and the intention behind the breath which helped to initiate their movement and maintain contact. This reiterated the importance of breath and how it enhances weight baring and influences the fluidity in released movement.
We then explored the Underscore created by Nancy Stark smith. This initially proved difficult as a collective as it felt as though the freedom we usually would have to explore movement was being taken away slightly as we had not looked at an underscore before. However this was not the case. Naively I thought the idea of a score would restrict my movement rather than open up more opportunities to see what I was capable of creating.
Personally the beginning of the score was the most beneficial towards my own practice. Finding everyone arriving in the space energetically, then physically, then communication about injuries created a calming and trusting atmosphere with everyone in the group which I believe helped me to have the confidence with new people who I usually would not interact with, and explore working in bigger groups of 3 or 4 people, rather than relying on working in a pair with the same people as I usually would, that is starting to feel slightly habitual and too comfortable. Unfortunately, later on in the jam I found myself creating movement based on the conversation I was listening to from my partner rather than thinking of the underscore and thinking or new ways to move. I could have tried to interpret ‘attraction’ or ‘repulsion’ to bring a more interesting contribution to the conversation, nevertheless we remained to have fluent movement and the content we created was successful.
I found that without guidance from Kirsty I would have forgotten about the way the underscore worked or that I had to follow the different sections. However the reassurance of knowing I would be reminded of way to think to make move in a new way made it easier to stick to the underscore as it would have been easy to have ignored it and gone into a completely open score, which we had the ability to do towards the end of jam.
The jam this week felt like an emotional end to a great practise, I became increasingly more confident with looking at the underscore again during this session after already exploring it in the previous session. I found that I remained in the space throughout the entire jam and worked with several different people. I found working with the level three students to be refreshing and help me to think of completely new ways of moving, which I believe is a result of their group dynamic being different to ours but is still introduced in to our practice.