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.