ACD207- Improvisation in movement and dance

Week 1 Notes:

Assessment 1: journal do week 1 to week 11 what we did and what I learnt about 100 words a week.
And can use the journal prompts

Assessment 2: 3 improv routines

Assessment 3: essay about readings and what we learnt and based on themes (more focused and
more about specific artists) Still reflective. Write your essay in first person.

Readings:

Week 1:

- During improv you are building on the known and adding in the unknown
- Coping in improv is always encouraged as it generates new movements and different flow to
your body
- Scores: propositions/prompts in which to dance e.g. every movement starts with falling, fall
catch and reach
- Scores can take many forms e.g. words, pics, maps
- Modern dancers used to use improv until they wanted structured and more formal dancing
- Cartesian dualism: hierarchy-mind tells body what to do (mind above body)

Artist of the week:

Steve Paxton

- Does contact improvisation but we wont do that due to taking too much time.
- Dancers are on top of each other spinning and jumping, holding onto each other lifting one
of the ground.
- Using momentum and gravity. Keeping touch through improv and movement and using
centrifugal force. Using touch to keep both bodies in harmony. Years before they weren’t
very adventurous and then grew to be more adventurous and lifting each other up and
spinning.

Another reading in the list for Paxton.

Week 2:

Artist of the week:

Rosalind Crisp

Week 3:

Artist of the week:

Ohad Naharin
Gaga technique:

- Longevity
- Soul
- Listening to the body
- No mirrors
- Don't do much but delicate can become wow
- Efficiently moving the body
- Keep moving throughout the whole class

Week 4:

Artist of the week: (fun video- reference in journal)

Fransythe

- American (did sculptures)

- Started with ballet ballet then got interested in what's outside that
- Used improv technologies
- Still making work
- Generating movement through his sculpture he created in GOMB
- One flat thing:
- There is an analysis of this piece on motion bank
- He created a set of rules and vocab to generate movement you can:
- A line between two points either between body parts or within body parts
- Curved lines and follow the movement to a point where it can no longer be moved
- Parallel between limbs and moving between curvatures or mathematical lines that they
follow
- Creating lines between different body parts using body parts to create lines and create new
shapes that can be moved
- Use the movement through your whole body
- Establish avoidance around a line to generate movement or around your previous body
position
- Circling the body part or joint to generate movement
- So that they can generate the precision of the movements to create a choreographed piece
and aesthetic that looks good to the audience
- Due to them being in a ballet company they need to do "the same thing" or similar and
generating movement through ballet as the basis
- Using improvisation to generate a set routine with maybe some improv movements
- Drawing shapes and using them in your dance e.g. hula hoops on the ground moving my
body through it.

Week 5:

Artist of the week:

Week 6:

Artist of the week:

Kent de Spain
Reading Notes:

- Improv is fun and not always about creating movement to perform

- Improv is now non-differentiated between his everyday life.
- Reacting, observing, directing the action or being acted upon or a mix of them.
- Three categories of how he described what he was doing: Movement descriptors, actions of
information gathering and acknowledgement, the nature of relationship between myself
and the piece.
- Being aware of ourselves while improv can help knowing the intentions
- Intentionality 3: relationships between; intentions and movement, intention and the
physical body, and intentions and elements of artistic form.
- Impulses vs. intentions: is an impulse an intention that you just act upon without editing
- Intention to not let the tension of the hand/arm affect the rest of my body but the body can
amend the intention in which the rest of the body slowly starts to tense as well.

Read pg 27-35

Video of Kent:

- Improv through acting out a scene or emotion (?)

- Very structured, slow and controlled of his movements

Week 7 Notes:

- In your own time!

Week 8 Notes:

Anna Halprin:

- Started improvising and focusing on the internal environment and then eventually turned to
needing the external environment and eventually developed the environmental
performances.
- Moved with her architectural husband and he built her a dance deck on her treehouse,
where many performances were done and the public saw many of them in their ‘private’
space.
- Took the structure and approach of the RSVP cycles into her dance
- Used feelings within her dances
- “The first step is to form a common basis of communication stemming from shared
experiences. This is essential because "dance" has come to mean so many differ-ent things
to different people. People in our workshops may have had yoga, belly dancing, ballet,
modern, folk, or no formal training at all. Perhaps they have seen "dancing" on TV or on
stage and think of dance in these terms. Our first task, then, is to establish a direct, personal
experience for everyone using natural movement as the basis for building an image of
movement-dance. Our approach leans heavily on natural movement. This means building
and developing an awareness of how you feel your body moving and/or how you can
interrelate feeling yourself with the movement of others and/or can feel yourself with
others in the physical environment.” -Anna Halprin, & Rachel Kaplan. (1995). Moving Toward
Life : Five Decades of Transformational Dance. Wesleyan University Press. – this explains our
dance classes and how we started our AT1 and dance generation.
- We will also need to create a basis of communication for our group performances so that
our group dance can be more cohesive then unmatched.
- “We use collective creativity to teach, train, and produce performances of theater works.
Although personal growth will take place in this approach, we do not stop at this level, but
move on to creating results together that relate to group and community growth.”- Anna
Halprin, & Rachel Kaplan. (1995). Moving Toward Life : Five Decades of Transformational
Dance. Wesleyan University Press.
- RSVP stands for resources, scores, valuaction, performance
- This is important for group dance- closed scores vs. open scores to reach the same result
- Scores generate creativity, alter state of consciousness to help the body reach optimal use.
- Acknowledging scores can also be open or closed as well.
- Valuaction “means what worked (felt right) or did not work (felt bad) for every-one
(consensus) according to our objectives.” APA 7th Edition (American Psychological Assoc.),
Anna Halprin, & Rachel Kaplan. (1995). Moving Toward Life : Five Decades of
Transformational Dance. Wesleyan University Press.
- Performance requires different levels of skill and talent and is very important