The focal point of this week’s lesson was around the concept of ‘tracking’ as discussed in Landscape of the now (2014) by Kent De Spain. After reading the full chapter prior to the lesson, I could see that there are a lot of elements to tracking whilst improvising, however, I didn’t appreciate how challenging it could be until I turned it into practice.

We started the lesson by working individually, moving around the space, preparing the body for movement through improvisation. Looking back, this could have been a great task for me to fully explore my kinesphere, however, I feel that I didn’t use it in this way and instead my movement choices were very habitual. I had chosen to move in a speed that felt very comfortable and therefore was not challenging myself either – if I continue to do this, it will not be helpful in the progression of my improvisation abilities and next week I want to make a conscious effort to be more explorative with my movement. The speed was soon required to increase; when this happened, I feel my movement literally became just movement, there was no thought or feeling towards it, I wasn’t bringing any technique to it and I literally felt like I was throwing myself around. All my movement during this task was created completely in the moment.

My favourite task today was ‘Think, Imagine, Move’. I found that having the time to think about the movement I wanted to do resulted in a more unique and innovative creation, rather than the habitual movement that I would normally do. It was really helpful in exploring outside my movement vocabulary. When we were required to repeat what we had created in this stop start manner to normal speed with no breaks, I found that in comparison to the other tasks today, it was a lot easier to track what I had done because I had a little bit more time when creating. I really struggled with the tracking of movement during many of the other tasks today involving remembering a sequence that we had created through improvisation and repeating it. Perhaps the ‘Think, Imagine, Move’ task required too much thinking and so I have to question if my movement was truly improvisation?

“As I am Improvising, I am noticing certain aspects of what is happening to me, conscious and unconscious, so that I can use them to inform my choice-making.” (De Spain, 2014, 45) I feel that this quote is summative of what I have discovered from this lesson today. In improvisation there needs to be a balance between how much you are absorbed in the now and how much you think. I feel this is necessary in order to be successful in improvisation.