What is form? Form in dance is the shaping of the body, movement arrangement, arrangement of the body within the space or the shape that a dance takes over time. Dance makers such as Anna Halprin, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton and Richard Ball use these to help shape their dances. These dancers and others use different forms and materials they find interesting, they have different performance practices, they teach in different ways, use different scores or pathways. These choreographers point of views on form are interesting to see their outlook on form and improvisation. Steve Paxton says “Relation between form and improvisation is intrinsic.”
To begin with walking, running and jogging through the space, this exercise was very interesting to do as we had to work together as group on stopping and starting. When we were walking I felt like I could feel everyone’s body and sense when people were going to start and stop. However, once we started to speed up into a jog and run I felt much more unaware of what people’s bodies were doing in the space. It became more difficult to stop and start but I feel like once we started this and got into a jog and run more the stop and start became a bit easier when we worked together more with our bodies.
To continue, flocking as one group I enjoyed doing because I was able to see what peoples movement was like and I noticed that when we were flocking naturally people would go straight for arm movements and there was a lot of swinging. I like how steady paced when we got into two groups and were in the big flock. I felt nice to rush because it gave time for the movement to happen within the body and flow. It was interesting when we were in the two groups because I noticed how people would either go the same direction or try to contrast what everyone was doing. Also looking back when split into two groups the group opposite would be contrasting at points to our group’s movement and it felt at points we were having a conversation with them which I really enjoyed.
Change, continue, develop this I found hard to do but I enjoyed that I got to challnge my body to use different parts that I wouldn’t naturally use and I wanted to try and get new movment within my body. I notcied in this activity that when I went into my habitual movment I would try and challenge myslf to come out of it. During this I noticed that I wasn’t going into habitual movment as much as last week, it was intresting to do when my partner asked me to develop. The movment I would try to develop but I found myself stopping and thinking at points so I could develop the movment, this is habit I would like to get out of in improve and just go with it. When splitting into two groups I found it memerising to be an obsever because, compared to last week people were really coming out of their natural movments every now and then it would happen but not as much. Whilst doing it and following intructions it was harder with some than others for example, keeping my right hand on the floor it really made me think about the movment I could do if I kept it on the floor. One of the rules was no arms because with both groups we would all naturally use our arms and this made me think more about what my core and legs to do if my arms are behind me.
Score Rules:
• Stage 1 top left hand corner
• Stage 2 top right hand corner
• Stage 3 half the stage at the front
• Stage 4 all of the stage
• Stage 1 and 2 only allowed to walk, run, fall, kneel, stand, turn, working with the idea of change and develop
• Stage 3 and 4 allowed any movement working with the idea of change, develop and continue
• This score was about relationships between each other how can we develop each other’s movement? How can we contrast and work with each other?
• Everyone has to start at the perimeter
• Can enter the space anytime to make a duet, trio or quartet
Finally a score this I found hard to do because of the rules I found it very resistricting with the rules in the corners cause you really had to think about what the body could do and what movments you could do. However using half the room and all the room because we were allowed to do anything but keeping the idea of change, contiue, develop I felt a bit more free and I felt like I could explore my body and movement much more. I enjoyed it a lot when we were in the middle because we were allowed to use this idea of flocking and copy people. I really liked seeing and trying what people were doing because it enabled me to come away from that habitual movement and look at what they were doing and try to fit that into my body. As an observer at points it was really nice to watch because people would have really nice partner or bigger group work going on and they would really contrast with each other. Comapred to copying each other last week I noticed people went a lot more steady and werent rushing the movement but they were allowing it to flow a lot more.