This week I was unable to join in, but to watch the rest of the class was interesting and influential.
The first exercise was used as a way to warm up their bodies from the inside to the outside, even though they were just laying on their backs they hand to keep their mind engage and active, whilst relaxed. They had to track through their bodies what parts were in connection to the floor. I could see people holding tension in their necks and shoulders, this is not good for the body as it can cause pain, however I understand how hard it is to relax them. The piece of imagery I use to help me relax those places is think that they are melting into the floor. The next part of this exercise they then had to think about keeping their heads in contact with the floor i.e. top, side or the back; when watching this you could see that a lot of the class were tense in the back of the neck and head. Throughout the whole of contact improvisation, you need to be able to release the whole of your body so you don not injure or cause strain to yourself.
Imagine trying to give the weight of your head to someone? I cannot think how hard it would be. Observing the class, you could see that for most people when exploring their different kinespheres, the movement became more experimental on the lower kinesphere as they said it was easier to give you’re the weight of your head to them at that level, I also noticed that when people started to get other body parts involved it became more explorative. From my observations I could see the partner holding the head was sometimes trying to control were their partner was going and what they were doing, but they were only there to support their heads.
Body connections…in contact we do not just use touch to connect we use our eye contact as a form of connecting to one another. “While in contact, we attend to our reflexes, which have been stimulated by the other’s movements. Our reflexes move us, and this causes our partner to move. This is the cycle of movement responses is continuous and forms the basis of the dialogue.” (Turner, 2010, p130-p131). This relates to the idea of mutual communication, you follow your partner’s movements and then they follow yours, sometimes they can be experimental and other times you will fall back into what you have done before.
When the class started to travel across the room it was interesting as you got to see how different people changed their confidence, especially when learning the ‘aikido roll’, everyone learnt to do this on their own then doing it with a partner was introduced as the connection between the two had to remain throughout for the transfer to be successful. Another difficult exercise was the back to back connection with the leg extension, many people struggled with this whilst I was observing as they struggled to keep the contact throughout. Another observation I saw when watching this was the height difference is key you need to be similar heights to your partner, if not then you need to accommodate for your partner’s height. When I questioned people as to how it felt doing this they said weird as the positioning of your body on your partners body was hard as you were going backwards.
During Thursday night’s contact jam, I was really struggling to get into it, I think it may have been that I was unable to join in in the lesson on the lead up to this session. So I was behind everyone else at the start of the lesson and due to an injury, I am warier of putting my weight onto others and them putting their weight onto me. This is something I wish and need to overcome for this module, and it is very tough. After we had flicked back to the across the room activities from Tuesdays lesson, we then went into out ‘jam’. Personally this was harder than last week, due to the fact the music was slower, however when a more upbeat track came on more people entered the centre of the circle. Another point I noticed was that the energy level was not as high as last week, as the lectures were not involved. I am looking forward to both of next weeks’ sessions as we are starting to look at weight bearing, this will help us in our ‘jams’ from then onwards.
Bibliography:
Turner, Robert. TDR: The Drama Review, Fall2010, Vol. 54 Issue 3, p123-135, 13p, 5 Black and White Photographs.