We began our first lesson of dance improvisation in pairs, starting by simply throwing and catching the bean bag whilst moving. This allowed us to explore the space and check our spatial awareness. However, the throwing and catching of the bean bag then became more complicated when new terms were added, meaning I had to think and make decisions a lot more quickly. The rule I found most challenging was freezing straight after throwing the bean bag. This was because I had become used to running to a new space every time I had previously thrown the bean bag so I had to decode what had already become muscle memory to stop myself from running. By this point, the list of rules had extended too, so we now had to drop when we heard a bean bag in the room drop, as well as freeze and watch where our partner would move to next so that we could prepare to catch the bean bag. Due to having lots to think about and focus on, I found it difficult to coordinate all of these new rules together and this could be another reason why I instinctively went back to running to a new space when I was meant to freeze.

The main task in hand was to create a score within our group of eight, incorporating the previous ideas from the partner task. Our score was controlled by the pair who were throwing the bean bag and making a sound each time they did so. But as a fixed term in the score, the pair would always have to come back to the sound ‘sssh’, making the surrounding pairs, who were throwing and catching the bean bag, drop to the floor. Although we (as the surrounding pairs) were improvising as we had no idea when the sound to make us drop was going to happen, you could say it was partly choreographed because we had pre-planned the movement we were going to do (dropping to the floor) prior to creation. This applies to another of our fixed terms too as when a pair dropped their bean bag, they had to jump and freeze until someone else dropped their bean bag. In order to truly be improvising, perhaps we could have each done our own individual movement that we felt appropriate when we heard the controlling sound or dropped the bean bag. Looking back, I feel that our score was quite structured as we didn’t really have any unfixed terms and had planned for every possible scenario we discovered. Due to our score not having a finite end, maybe if we had extended the duration, we may have discovered more unfixed possibilities.

In reference to improvisation, Vida Midgelow states in her article that as a dancer you have to ‘give up expectations of pre-knowledge and control’ (Midgelow, 2012, 11) and this is something I can definitely say I found challenging to put into practice due to improvisation being out of my comfort zone. But now I have been introduced to improvisation, I hope that in future lessons I can start to fully embrace it.