As this week was the final week of our improvisation classes, the lesson revisited many of the concepts that we have discovered during the course. I realised from the lesson that Nancy Stark-Smiths ‘underscore’ is a favourite of mine because I feel I discover new things about my body and its way of moving each time I work with the method.

During the process, I feel I have definitely discovered movement from a number of starting points, mainly due to the various tasks set by Kayla. When it comes to scores that are free from Kayla’s direction, I know starting from a different point is something I need to work on more as I generally start standing on two feet, which is boring and habitual! I tend to forget about how I am starting the improvisation as I am too busy trying to think of all the other structures I want to incorporate. I do feel playing with the different concepts has been one of my strongest points during improvisation as I am often concentrating on using them when I am performing. I’ve found for me, imagery is the most effective way to break away from habitual patterns and discover movement.

From participating in class from an audience point of view, I’ve learnt that movement does not always have to be neat and pretty to look interesting. I find this movement can be effective but it depends on the intention the dancer has and how they work with the movement, but it is also ok for movement to look awkward and strange. There is no set way for movement to look. I’ve realised there are many different ways to capture the audience’s attention and improvisation involves the discovering of this. I find as an observer, my eye is often drawn to interesting group formations. This could be why when improvising myself I tend to join and create groups, rather than solo work.

After working with music for the final week of improvisation, I realised how much I prefer working with silence. I feel music dominates the movement creation in the work leading to habitual patterns. The only use I found for the music was how it felt and looked to rebel against it with movement; it was interesting to work with this and something that I would like to discover more about if I were to play with music and improvisation again. Apart from that, I just feel music limits an improvisation and that there are much more possibilities that can be discovered in silence. From an audience perspective, I found it is a lot more engaging when there is no music because you can completely focus on the material.

I feel improvisation has developed my confidence tremendously. In the earlier weeks I would feel nervous to perform to people in the class due to feeling judged and questioning if the movement I was doing was correct. I now realise that improvising is ultimately down to intention. For me it’s a practice for expression and discovery of the body and its possibilities. Although I now feel confident to perform a solo during improvisation, it is something I steer away from as previously mentioned I prefer group improvisations. I know that I should not neglect the role of a solo because of my personal preferences. I think solos are something that I need to work on in the future so that I can discover how to use improvisation concepts when I am alone. As I discovered in the pop up scores, I felt confident as a dancer in the space, however, I was not completely confident with how I was using the space.

The pop up scores also made me realise the importance of the audience/improviser relationship. As an audience member it was so interesting to see the ways the scores differed in the different seating arrangements. I particularly enjoyed being an audience member when we were permitted to walk through the space as it felt like we were also a part of the score, making the whole experience more engaging than in traditional seating. As a performer, it was also interesting to see how the audience effected my performance when they were in the round. I felt that I was improvising for them, rather than what I usually do which is primarily for my self-discovery. Due to them being in a much closer environment, I could feel their presence much more intensely and this effected my movement choices. I do feel I need to work on striking the balance between how much I am improvising for myself and for the audience as I think I often get lost in the discovery of my movements and forget to project and focus on the audience. The audience can create just as interesting possibilities with just their effect on your body as you can when trying to discover movement for yourself. I think in future improvisation practices, I will consciously add them into my intentions.

In reference to the body, Deborah Hay states “as an imagined condition it is infinite in its feedback (Hay, cited in De Spain, 2014, 93). This quote particularly stands out to me as there really are so many possibilities for the body in improvisation and each week I have been amazed at what I have discovered. The body is your primary tool in improvisation and I know what I have learned over the weeks with my body has made a permanent influence on my practice.

This week we started by revisiting Nancy Stark-Smith’s underscore which we first looked at in the jam last week. My favourite phases of the underscore were the exploration of the lower kinesphere and upper kinesphere as I feel when they were isolated, my movement exploration became very interesting and far from my usual habitual patterns. After working with the underscore for a second time, I can see why Stark-Smith chooses to use the method as the different phases really tailor to every aspect of the body, meaning it allows for all different kinds of movement creation. The movement created, although following the same motions, created different vocabulary to that of the previous time. I’m sure if I were to do it a third time I would discover new possibilities once again. I found the underscore a very successful way to experiment with movement.

The most insightful moment to me during the score, was when I wanted to change the dynamics as I felt the space needed something new and so came in with movement of the lower kinesphere which we had previously experienced in the score. My intention was to change the score with the idea that others would follow, but instead I was eventually left in the space alone. This was really daunting and I quickly became out of breath and repetitive with my movement as I tried to fill the space with the responsibility of making the score interesting. I felt like my movement would have been much more enhanced had more people entered the space. Although my original intention did not work out, I learnt from this experience as I discovered ways to use the space when you are completely solo, something that I have not given myself the opportunity to do before as I generally do not feel confident in the empty space. Maybe now that I have experienced this, it will give me the confidence to enter the space when it is empty and be the first person to instigate movement when there are no suggestions.

Following on from last week’s session, we returned to our group score and made some alterations in order to develop the problems that we discovered. Our main concern was that we didn’t feel the audience clearly understood our score’s intention and so most of our developments were made with this in mind.

As previously mentioned, I didn’t feel that the habitual movement role challenged me and this was widely agreed in the group so we eliminated this role. Instead we decided that we should all be creators of movement material and that what we are creating should not be habitual; however even if the intention is not to be habitual this does not always stop a dancer – as I found I often unintentionally over use my arms. We felt the strongest element of our original score was the shouting out of limitations to the dancers, and this aided all dancers in staying away from habitual movement so we kept this as a key feature of the score. We didn’t completely remove the manipulator and interpreter role, but we did alter the original purpose in order to make the score more effective. We altered the idea of their being one manipulator by deciding that we should all be manipulators whenever we felt necessary.  I feel the alterations we made definitely made the score more complex and challenging; there was not a time when I felt restricted or unchallenged, like in the previous week, because the alterations meant that the role of the dancer was every changing. This meant I didn’t find myself steering away or towards one role more than another because it was all challenging.

When watching the video of our score, I feel like the alterations succeeded in making the score’s intention to the audience clearer, however, I think it was not interesting to watch as we lacked creativity with our limitations. In the jam, we further developed the score with this in mind by discussing that some elements, such as change of speed and spacing were features that we needed to consciously think about, rather than be told during the score. This created room for more interesting limitations to occur.

The main focus of this week was on Anna Halprin’s use of ‘RSVP cycles’. As a task, we had to write down a question that we had about improvisation. My question was “How do I incorporate all of the different techniques/concepts of improvisation without falling back into habitual movement?” I wrote this question as I find that when I’m improvising, if I am thinking about making my movement less habitual I forget to incorporate interesting devices, but if I am thinking about using devices I will become habitual in my movement. To try to answer my question, in groups we created a score. In order to create a score that had clarity we wrote a structure/outline, similarly (but on a smaller scale) to the ‘circle the earth’  score outline that can be seen in this week’s reading ‘Anna Halprin’  by Worth and Poynor, to try to avoid what they describe as a “potentially chaotic process” (Worth and Poynor, 2004, 112).

Our score consisted of five dancers and three roles that were inspired by Thomas Lehmen’s ‘functions’. The first role was to create habitual material that the second role of the interpreter would interpret in a way that was evidently not habitual. The third role was the manipulator, who we set the limitation of not being allowed to use hands to manipulate as this is a very habitual way of manipulating. I found when we performed the score I steered towards the interpreter as I really want to stay clear of habitual movement as I feel that it is my weakest area. I feel I performed the role of the interpreter well as I really made an effort to be unusual in my movement choices and I could tell that I was succeeding as the movement felt different to what I have experienced before. As a goal for next week, I would like to find a way to make the first role of creating material useful to my progression in improvisation, as I feel because the idea is to make the movement habitual that it does not benefit me in building my improvisation skills because I am trying to move away from habitual movement and this role does not challenge me. Perhaps if we were to add some limitations to the role then it would make the role more challenging and something that could help me grow with improvisation.

I feel that the lessons have progressed dramatically over the weeks and the scores have increased in complexity. They are a lot more challenging and it is much more interesting to perform and watch the scores that we are creating now. I feel I am pushing myself further each week and I believe this is creating a positive impact on my improvisation.

In partners, the most engaging task to me today involved using imagery to send impulses. The first image was to imagine we were kittens and I found this resulted in the impulses being sent through mainly the use of my head – I avoided using my hands as I didn’t feel it was relevant to the imagery and this helped in making more unusual movement. I also found that the pathways were predominately circular. I liked the kitten imagery the best as I think I was more explorative with how I used impulse; it definitely felt a lot different sending impulses with an image in mind rather than just sending them with no thematic intention. The wrestler imagery was the one I found the most difficult to use because I felt like I had to be aggressive in dynamic but I didn’t want to act in that way towards my partner. This resulted in my movement content becoming very limited due to fact I felt uncomfortable. The main feeling I took away from the experience of this task was how interesting it was to play around with the different dynamic qualities that all of the imagery tasks offered. I now realise that this would be a good thing to incorporate into my practice so that I can develop my improvisation further.

We created a score this week with ideas from Thomas Lehmen’s ‘functions’. This involved the use of five roles: the material, interpreter, manipulator, observer and mediator. I found myself leaning towards the role of the observer. When I watched other dancers take on the role of the observer I often found the role didn’t really serve a purpose on stage. I was intrigued to try and fix this and to try to find a purpose for the observer; this could be why I steered towards this role as it was the one I had the most questions about. When I saw the score from an audience point of view, I found that on the rare occasion that the observer was on a low level, it drew my attention to what they were looking at. With this in mind, one way I explored the role was through distance; If I found something interesting, I would stand close to the dancer in the hope that it would draw the audience’s attention to what I was watching. Doing this made me feel like I had a purpose as the observer. I could have made this intention clearer by standing even closer to the point of feeling awkward with the hope that it would draw their attention to that part of the stage. I would like to have seen a dancer play with the distance of the observer like I did to see if my theory really did work. Overall I found the whole score really challenging this week as it took me a while to get my head around the idea of the different functions. This could have been another reason why I chose to observe the majority of the time as some may say this was one of the easier roles and it gave me a chance to properly understand the ‘functions’. However, this meant I didn’t challenge myself as much as I could have. I feel from an audience point of view that the mediator served the most useful purpose within the score as they helped to create connections between the different movement content that was happening on stage – this became particularly helpful when the stage seemed crowded.

The lesson this week had a large focus on moving us away from the use of habitual movement. Buckwalter states “practices that begin with an external perspective often lead to investigation of the internal and vice versa” (Buckwalter, 2010, 91) and my favourite task today really explored her theory by using different strategies involving imagery. The internal use of imagery really did help me to investigate the external movement and space in less habitual ways. Out of all the strategies used, I feel the imagery of trying to get your head to touch your sit bones definitely helped me the most. When I was imaging this, I found myself getting into all sorts of positions that I never thought possible! The new movement I discovered felt so much more interesting to work with compared to my usual habitual patterns. Another of the strategies involved imaging that all of the cells in your body are in a race. During this, I reached a new level of speed that I had never worked with before and it was very physically challenging. The movement that stemmed from this was created completely in the moment as I didn’t have time to think – I even found myself jumping which is not in my usual movement vocabulary, however with the intention of the strategy, jumping seemed to feel natural.

During the jam this week we looked at the concepts of thick skinning and impulse. When looking at impulse with my partner, it was really interesting to see how my partner reacted when I sent an impulse into her; sometimes she would move a way that I would perhaps not have expected her to because I wouldn’t have gone that way myself personally. This worked vice versa as when I was the one being given the impulse, it would come from directions that I would not be expecting it to and I feel this element of surprise created completely raw movement as it stemmed from my first response to the impulse. When we created a score with the concepts, I found it was a lot more difficult to use them. I think this difficulty occurred because we used ‘the wave’ strategy and this meant that once you entered the space you could not leave and others could not come in until the wave cleared the space. A moment of the score that stood out to me was when I was in the space with two other people, creating a trio. I realised how different it was from working with the concepts in a duo – it was much more difficult. The extra person added a different element to the concepts as it meant that there was more thinking and complexity involved because I wasn’t just considering one person’s intentions anymore, I had to consider two people. I think as I wasn’t expecting it to be such a big difference working from a duo to a trio, the shock made me panic and this led to my movement lacking in creativity. I also found myself wanting to exit the space or have someone else come in so I could create something new because I felt uncomfortable in the trio, but due to the wave strategy, none of my preferred scenarios could occur. However I do think this strategy helped me to push myself because it meant I couldn’t give up and exit just because it was a challenging task.

The paper by Ribeiro and Fonseca questioned “How is it possible to make a shared choice of movements during improvisation between two or more dancers, without previous agreement and without communication through words?” (Ribeiro and Fonseca, 2011, 72); in my own practice, although I feel I am improving in comparison to previous weeks, I do find it difficult to make shared choices with other dancers without words. I am sometimes very obvious facially that I am trying to work out what others are intending in their improvisation so I know whether to contribute or not and this does not look aesthetically pleasing. Ribeiro and Fonseca suggest “empathy allows the sharing of modes of thinking-feeling the dance so that a group of dancers can decide together when, where, how and which movement to do” (Ribeiro and Fonseca, 2011, 82). From this I will incorporate the idea of kinaesthetic empathy into my practice in the future to see if it improves my communication with other dancers.