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.