This week was based on the idea of touch. in class we played with entire body by using an exercise called surfing and rolling. the main ideas of this exercise were to give our weight to each other and use the momentum of the roll to push us over the other. this idea was very foreign to me and It took me a while for my body to get used to giving my entire weight to another body, this was mainly because im so used to being the person supporting another persons weight rather than the other way around. However, once I had figured out how to use my breath and jigsaw myself within the other person the entire exercise became a lot more fluid. an idea that was suggested to us while acting out this task was Proprioception, from what I have understood this is the idea of ones self and how we feel our senses, like this idea of what body parts are touching and how we are interacting with the floor.
The reading for this week in my opinion was phenomenal, it discussed into detail a lot points which really helped me understand contact improvisation. One of these ideas was that the quality of touch rather than the quantity of touch was very important for our development as dancers. this is talking about how we move with another body rather than how much movement we do with another body, this important because we could be able to move with a partner for a long duration of time but if the movement has no meaning or intention then what was the point in doing such a long improvisation? One thing that I noticed from this reading was that it contradicted a point that we had been taught previously from our improvisation module, we were always taught to avoid thinking too much within a improv jam but in this reading it basically rejected this idea and tells its reader too stay focused and within the jam at all times, this does make a lot of sense though, if you were not focused and thinking within a contact jam then you could cause some serious injuries to other members of your group or to yourself.
Probably the most important point that this reading suggested was that touch generates fresh movement and opens us up to learning. I felt like this was the most important because it pretty much explains why contact improvisation exists. The idea that touch generates movement is obvious but the idea that it creates fresh and exciting movement is vital, if it wasnt for methods like contact then contemporary dance wouldnt necessarily be as profound as it in the 21st century. Its this idea of giving weight and working as bodies that creates such amazing improvisations that look as if they have been rehearsed for months.
Our first contact jam was uncomfortable for my body this week. I found it very hard to interact with the other bodies in the space, I think this may have been because we have not got the tools to be able to fully use a contact jam but still just trying to do the simplest interaction seemed awkward to me. for the next jam I plan to experiment with eye contact and how this can be considered as contact and use this eye contact to make my interactions a lot easier to move into.