This week we started off with a trust exercise called ‘hand on back’. I call this a trust exercise because one of us constantly had our eyes closed and were being guided around the space, this trust was gained by the partner with their eyes open having full hand to back contact at all times. What I noticed with this exercise was that within our partners we were constantly having a bodily dialogue that guided us through the space, by adding gentle pressure to specific parts of our partners lower back we were able to move them in the direction that we wanted them to travel. Sometimes it was hard to negotiate with my partner as to which direction we were moving in, by this I mean when adding pressure to specific points in the back, my partner would misinterpret and move in the wrong direction, in danger of causing collisions.
During our first contact jam we played with the idea of fluidity within our tools for contact improve, we worked with our surf and roll technique and played with ways of moving across a back. I really enjoyed experimenting with movement on peoples backs. For me, it felt very comfortable to throw myself into the exercises given and really try working with these new ideas of contact. unfortunately I am still having trouble with releasing my full weight within an open space environment, there was one point during this jam where I had to be reminded to give all my weight but once I was reminded the jam became a lot smoother, to explain why I think this happened I want to look back on one of the readings from this week written by Maxine Sheets – Johnstone (MSJ) called Thinking In Movement, in this reading she talks about how we are constantly thinking unconsciously when we dance. I am bringing this up because I feel that at the start of my jam I felt like I was thinking too much of the technical side to contact, and because I was trying to hard to be correct, this then influenced my movement in a negative way.
In our second jam this week I really struggled to get into the jam and due to this I then had such a negative mind set that the rest of the jam was ruined for myself, this was mainly brought on by the injury of my knee and going back to the earlier reading, I was consciously aware of my injury so I then felt very restricted to how I moved throughout the space. What I am hoping for by writing this is to gain a unconscious awareness of these restrictions in hopes that they no longer hinder my movement but instead gives me a new way of exploring movement through other surfaces of my body. Also in this jam we began to introduce our bodies into ‘going up’ exercises where we lifted people from standing rather than a secure table top position. the reason behind this was based from a blog post we discussed in class; ‘You don’t have to stop moving in table top – be an underdancer’. this blog post discussed how the table top position has become a fixed state which dancers get trapped in when moving within contact, this post was incredibly useful when coming to our contact jams this week because it was constantly in my mind of trying to find new ways of supporting the overdancer’s instead of being stuck in this table top position.
Contact Improvisation Blog. (2017). You dont have to stop moving in table top – be an underdancer. [online] Available at: http://contactimprovblog.com/you-dont-have-to-stop-moving-in-table-top-to-be-an-underdancer [Accessed 24 Sep. 2017].
Daniellepkoff.com. (2008). Contact Improvisation: A question. [online] Available at: http://daniellepkoff.com/writings/CI%20A%20question.php [Accessed 24 Sep. 2017].
Sheets- Johnstone, M. (2017). Thinking In Movement. Contact Quarterly, 42(1), pp.7-11.