Week 4 – Smalldance and Research Labs

Small dance is a theory created by Steve Paxton that shows the constant motion of the body when standing still. It is a phenomological understand of our body through a lived experience. In class we experimented with this idea by doing an exercise where we stood still and felt the sensations of stillness. Once I had found the sensation of swaying that my body was doing while standing still, I then exaggerated this swaying movement and explored the impulses and reflexes that I tried to subdue while in stillness. Once deep into the exercise I noticed that my body had twitches such as twinges in my shoulder and leg, I continued to explore this movement and transferred my thoughts from this idea of swaying to, what I believe is the opposite, idea of bouncing, my reasoning for this was to explore the feeling through the body while doing these two opposite movements. What I found was when doing the swaying movements my body felt a lot lighter and easier to move throughout my kinesphere. Whereas during the bouncing movement it was a lot more difficult to move as my body felt heavier, I also noticed that my movement mainly came from the shoulders and knees when bouncing where during the swaying it mainly came from the torso and pelvis.

Research Lab (What we did and what we found. reflection) – This week our question was How does eye contact effect movement within improvisation? We chose this question because of an exercise we had previously done in contact classes, where two people roll across the floor and have to keep eye contact at all times, the reason this very simple exercise influenced our question was because of how much the exercise can differ with or without eye contact. So we wanted to explore if this was the case when doing improvisations. For this we gave the class two tasks;

  • Improvise for 5 minutes while avoiding eye contact.
  • Improvise for 5 minutes while keeping eye contact with a participant at all times.

Our original idea was the improvise for 5 minutes but upon watching the group performing we decided to bring it down to 3 minutes. Once both tasks had been completed we sat down as a collective and discussed how people felt about both tasks. From the discussion we found out that keeping eye contact while improvising and trying to incorporate contact also, was very difficult. Participants found that there always seemed to be partners forming and once a couple was created it was very difficult to break them apart. another participant had stated that when one of the task leaders spoke while they were improvising that they found it very challenging not to shift their eyes in our direction. One of our questions to the group was, “Was it easier to use contact when keeping eye contact?” the general consensus was that they struggled to interact using contact while keeping the eye contact, this was due to a lot of the contact tools we had been given at this time were mainly back to back, this carried on to specific members of the class saying that they felt restricted by needing to keep eye contact at all times because they felt that a lot of the general movement they were able to do was facing each other.

Reading – Is contact a small dance? was an Article written by Byron Brown discussing the problematic nature of Contact Improvisation, he compares a lot of his discussion with Mark Pritchard (Contact Improvisationalist) who’s concerns stem from many contactors just accepting what is happening within contact rather than doing something about it.  Brown agrees with this by saying “i feel there is much life in the contact community but there are more questions than there are answers.” (Brown, pg1, 1980-81) I feel like this is something that all dancers should be thinking about when exploring contact because as artists we should always be willing to go past our comfort zones and be looking for the answers rather than always expecting other artists to answer them for us. Another point in this reading which I thought was quite interesting was when Brown talks about ‘functional movement’ instead of ‘natural’ when describing this says “…we learn to use our bodies in necessary and efficient ways in order to relate to our environment and a moving partner.” (Brown, pg2, 1980-81) Brown uses this as a way of removing the negative hang up that Pritchard focuses on when commenting on the principles and assumptions of contact. I personally, do not understand why there would be a hang up on an principle of contact such as ‘natural’ movement, I think that for someone who is fairly new to contact (such as myself) describing the movement as natural is a way of removing the complications of technical boundaries that come with some dance style, and I would agree with Brown’s new phrase of ‘functional movement’ as it contributes to the idea that safety, speed and ease it important. I think this reading can be related to a lot of what we did in class this week. We were performing our research labs and these are a way of answering questions that we feel needed answering, although this reading didnt directly influence our research it did however help towards a positive outlook when researching in this format.

YouTube. (2017). steve paxton. smalldance. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sJKEXUtv44 [Accessed 22 Oct. 2017].

Brown, B. (1980). Is Contact a small dance?. Contact Improvisation Source Book, 6(1), pp.72-75.

 

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