Teaching Creativity and mprovisation to Young Dancers - Mirroring with Variation

Mirroring is one of the most basic ways of exploring what your body can do in terms of movement. It trains dancers to be sensitive to movement quality, pace and direction.  Internally, mirroring also enables the performer to be sensitive to how the body wants to move.  In  a mirroring activity, two dancers face each other, one is the leader while the other is the follower. The leader initiates motion in a slow, sustained manner while the follower replicates the movement similar to a mirror image.  At some point in time, the roles switch as the leader now becomes the follower and vice versa.  As they gain more experience in mirroring, the concept of variation is introduced.  It is at this time they are taught to vary a gesture with respect to direction, level, etc.

Teaching mirroring to young dancers can be quite challenging.  When I first tried to this exercise, I realized that my students did not feel comfortable moving any which way they feel. I guess the years of disciplined training in classical Ballet under me made them so conscious of their technical "correctness".  So when I told them to move in any which way, they were stuck.  Normally the dancers would just move spontaneously,  but in the case of my students, they would just stand there not know what to do or just keep repeating certain steps we learned in class.  These were the very things, Agnes Locsin, former Artistic Director of Ballet Philippines, would be upset about in the classes she taught,  as she wanted to see dancers create movement.

To help my students do mirroring better, I first had them do one dancer exercises for them to create movement on their own.  For one of my nine year old students, I had her write her name on the floor in big letters. After this I had her write on the wall with the same size of letters.  Finally I had her write her name on an imaginary wall at the center of the room.  As you see in the video below, she is already beginning to dance.

For my older students, I wanted something more dramatic than writing their name. So I had them stand by the door frame and told them to find movement and poses related to the door.  Technically, what I had them do is a form of Structural Movement Analysis which I will tackle in a future post (thus no videos yet).  As soon as they found their movement phrase, I had them recreate it at the center away from the door frame.  When they were comfortable with their movement phrases, I had them to the mirroring exercise. ( I have to admit the their movement in the video is a bit faster than in typical mirror exercises.  )

 Ordinary Mirroring = Leader ( Lavender leotard) and Follower ( Red leotard ) have the same leg extended

 Mirroring with Variation = Leader ( Lavender leotard) extends leg forward while Follower ( Red leotard ) extends backward  

For the mirror exercises,  I had the leaders do 3 repetitions of their movement phrases.  As the 2nd and 3rd repetitions, the followers are allowed to vary any segment of the phrase in terms of directions and other parameters.  After completing the 3rd repetition, the role of leader is passed on to the follower with the passive dancer becoming the next follower and the former leader becoming observer.

The dancers really got the concept of variation.  The next step I have for them is to repeat the exercise using spontaneous movement generated.  I will also be introducing the concept of successions in the next session.