A really challenging and difficult morning and I am not going to dwell on the problems – that is for you to do as part of this blog. What is interesting though is that all of you seem to have lost sight of the fact that despite the problems encountered you all managed to produce work, you all created a performance to show, and that is worth reflecting upon.
Work in larger groups will get easier and Royona and I will employ strategies to enable you to engage with small group work in a less stressful and more organic fashion.
What you must not do is to take today’s session out of context and judge the whole semester’s work on the basis of what went on today. You have worked incredibly hard thus far and with great commitment and you have to have the confidence in yourselves to take this into semester 2.
This week then, can you reflect on the following:
1) There was a sense of you falling into bad habits – what are those habits that you relied on and how do they contrast with the good habits that you should have been employing?
2) Why do you think you relied so much on discussion when we have spent so long working on reaction and impulse?
3) Having gone through the process and produced a performance, evaluate that performance in terms of its strengths rather than its weaknesses.
Bahok, Akram Khan Dance Company
Exploring Liminality
Friday 12 December 2008
Friday 5 December 2008
Body memory, Movement and Message - 5th December 2008
Again a slightly different approach to the work today and again a different response in the end product.
The focus and concentration was really very good this morning and I think it is worth your while reflecting on your own journey through today’s session from the minute you walked in to the minute you left and try to analyse what is was that you personally contributed to the overall levels of focus.
Falls and catches can for many people be intimidating and scary techniques even at the most basic level and yet as a group these tasks were well executed and practiced.
The way in which the final work was devised was also impressive, the urgency to work and not discuss was just the correct way of moving work forward and I hope you can now see the disadvantages of too much discussion – too much talking about what you might do rather than working through what you can do. It may be worth considering in the future just how you can take the work that you have made and not rehearse it in the more accepted meaning of the word but rather refine it. By this I mean take the work created in a short space of time and then see how far you can take the one idea, see what messages the piece can communicate. There needs to be a recognition that the communication of a message or feeling can be done through the interaction between bodies and the movement rather than the need for mimetic reproduction of actions or overt and unnecessary facial expressions.
"The need to communicate is really powerful. But you can’t control it once its left because you never know how it’s going to be received. When we were making the work we were looking at all these tenuous connections between a bunch of characters and the messages that get passed from one to another that get misunderstood."
Kevin Finnan in Article 19
"I work, a lot, with task orientated techniques so I would give [the dancers] a task and see how they react to my idea. I like [the] process of digging in and not choosing the first things that comes out. [I] always try to go further and create the antagonism then go back and see how things happen after you create [that] antagonism in people, to look at many different options [within] a specific theme or specific movements and various styles of presentation before I decide how I want to present it."
Jasmin Vardimon in Article 19
Reflect on the following:
To what extent in the devising element did you and your partner work instinctively – how much of the work was initiated by the body’s instinctive reaction and to the impulses received from your partner?
Was there more than simply a matter of trust that allowed for the intensity of work whilst learning the falls and catches? How did these techniques translate into elements of the emotional journey in the final piece?
Was there an intended message in your piece? It is difficult to know if this transmitted successfully or not but you may like to reflect on how well you feel you managed to transmit your message. Did you fall into the trap of resorting to facial gesture and “acting”?
The focus and concentration was really very good this morning and I think it is worth your while reflecting on your own journey through today’s session from the minute you walked in to the minute you left and try to analyse what is was that you personally contributed to the overall levels of focus.
Falls and catches can for many people be intimidating and scary techniques even at the most basic level and yet as a group these tasks were well executed and practiced.
The way in which the final work was devised was also impressive, the urgency to work and not discuss was just the correct way of moving work forward and I hope you can now see the disadvantages of too much discussion – too much talking about what you might do rather than working through what you can do. It may be worth considering in the future just how you can take the work that you have made and not rehearse it in the more accepted meaning of the word but rather refine it. By this I mean take the work created in a short space of time and then see how far you can take the one idea, see what messages the piece can communicate. There needs to be a recognition that the communication of a message or feeling can be done through the interaction between bodies and the movement rather than the need for mimetic reproduction of actions or overt and unnecessary facial expressions.
"The need to communicate is really powerful. But you can’t control it once its left because you never know how it’s going to be received. When we were making the work we were looking at all these tenuous connections between a bunch of characters and the messages that get passed from one to another that get misunderstood."
Kevin Finnan in Article 19
"I work, a lot, with task orientated techniques so I would give [the dancers] a task and see how they react to my idea. I like [the] process of digging in and not choosing the first things that comes out. [I] always try to go further and create the antagonism then go back and see how things happen after you create [that] antagonism in people, to look at many different options [within] a specific theme or specific movements and various styles of presentation before I decide how I want to present it."
Jasmin Vardimon in Article 19
Reflect on the following:
To what extent in the devising element did you and your partner work instinctively – how much of the work was initiated by the body’s instinctive reaction and to the impulses received from your partner?
Was there more than simply a matter of trust that allowed for the intensity of work whilst learning the falls and catches? How did these techniques translate into elements of the emotional journey in the final piece?
Was there an intended message in your piece? It is difficult to know if this transmitted successfully or not but you may like to reflect on how well you feel you managed to transmit your message. Did you fall into the trap of resorting to facial gesture and “acting”?
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