Week 7- Research labs #2

This week was our second research lab, for this week we wanted to find out if, does knowing your point of gravity effect your balance in contact improvisation? The reason we wanted to ask this was mainly because of the reading Centre of Gravity from a previous week and the section where it discussed the centre point on cardboard cut outs, we read this and began to question what would happen if we were able to transfer this onto a human body. Our tasks were fairly simple, we asked the class to perform different exercises learnt in class and after testing each one out, they had to try and figure out where the points of gravity were on a another body and attach sticky notes to that point. The reason we did this was to get each person thinking about the points of gravity while doing the exercises as we hoped to notice a change in their movement style.

During our post lab talk we asked how the participants had felt after performing the exercise and the response was quite good. One of the members said that she thought that getting her to think about the points where the gravity is positioned helped with how she performed the second exercise (headstand over table top) because she didn’t feel like she was just flinging herself over her partner. Another member of the group said that she felt more secure and fluid the second time she performed the exercises because instead of just thinking about where each point of contact was they actually thought of where the weight was needing to be placed and how that effected balance. As part of the task we asked each pair to feedback to another couple as to what they were seeing and where they thought the points of gravity were. when we asked the group how this helped and it at all this changed how they were moving, one person said that this made them think a lot more and actually improved the movement in terms of security.

In terms of successfulness of this research lab, I felt that it was interesting what was found out in regards to the talk at the end, it seems safe to say that thinking about your points of gravity does effect your balance and security when performing certain exercises in contact improvisation. I think that although contact is an improvisation, and we have been taught to flow with the momentum of wherever the improvisation may be taking us, but it has come to my attention that its not only what is happening that we must think about, we also have to think about everything that is included with each weight transference or lift. Although yes for safe practice it makes sense to think about all these things but I disagree with the thought that any of these things needs to be processed by our conscious thinking, if we are unconsciously aware of these things and do not dwell on them too deeply then they will not restrict our bodies, which for me is more important.

During one of the other research labs myself and Abbie carried out our own improvised duet, this was massively explorative and experimental, we approached the duet with the idea of twisting and spiralling and the result was incredible. we found ourselves creating some really interesting work that was a lot different to what we had done previously, I think this has a lot to do with the amount of tools that we are learning in class, and because we have been taught more ‘going up” tools, we are a lot more comfortable with being lifted and shifted around the space.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *