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.