In today’s session we begun by watching back our work from the previous weeks, from this I found it extremely useful in visualising how I moved during contact improvisation. The way in which I fluidly gave my weight to others and smoothly transitioned out of contact lifts positively surprised me. Often when performing I do not feel as fluid, therefore watching myself back enabled me to see that my movement is more fluid than I initially thought. I feel I can improve on creating more surfaces on my body to effectively take more weight. When performing contact improvisation I try to encourage others to give me their weight, however I often fall back into the pattern of becoming the over dancer.

After watching the videos we moved onto a floor exercise that worked on quickly moving the pelvis through the space, this acted as ground work to be built up to moving the pelvis quickly and fluidly on and off another body. At first I found it relatively difficult to sharply execute my pelvis on and off my partner, however once I relaxed and let my body lead my movement became much more fluid and I felt confident in letting my pelvis take control. This exercise developed into leading with your legs. I felt more comfortable leading with my legs as I could achieve better contact positions, what’s more leading with the legs put less pressure and weight into my partner.

The final task of today’s session consisted of devising a contact score in groups to be performed during an open studio event. After reading Jamie Stover’s journal article Some Considerations When Structuring an improvisation it became clear that scores could differ in two ways. Firstly a score can be created that follows a strong structured order that does not alter during the performance. In contrast to this a loose score can be followed where the dance itself influences and changes the original score. (Stover, 1989, 185). Creating a structured score is beneficial as it means the improvisation has clarity and won’t get lost into a ‘jam’ style dance. My group has begun to devise a score that has a maximum of eight dancers in the space at a time; there can be less but no more than eight. What’s more when one dancer starts to enter the space another dancer must follow to create a duet, once a duet has been formed the aim is to travel in contact to the opposite side of the room. Within this score we have also created the opportunity for trios to be created, when I third person joins a duet there purpose is to change the direction and momentum of the dance. Our score so far is relatively simple and will be refined in next weeks class.

Works Cited

Stover, J. (1989). Some considerations when structuring an Improvisation (to be seen by an audience). Contact Quarterly/ Contact Improvisation Sourcebook II, Vol.14. pp185