Improvisation is a regular activity I have in my Contemporary Ballet Class. I find that doing improvisation exercises, improves the awareness dancers have for each other. It also trains them to notice nuances and movement details which will prove useful in their future training. The use of improvisation also makes the dancers aware of choreographic elements, enabling them to respond better to instructions and directions during choreography.
This week, I was working on structured improvisation. In class I had 2 dancers starting off with a mirroring exercise that was being done as each dancer was approaching the other. At the point of contact, the dancers were instructed to do a walk exercise with poses at moment of their choosing. On my cue, the dancers then shifted to a unison followed by having them make a shape that they would move and progress through the space.
Mirroring
Walk Exercise
Walks with a pose
Unison
Moving/Developing Shapes
I found that doing this exercise, the dancers were being trained to overcome their discomfort with using space. The pose exercise also helped them overcome their comfort with certain positions. A very good lesson in this exercise is that the dancers learned to do their movements based on the demands of the environment and in response to the movements of their fellow dancers.
You may want to try this out for yourself:
1. Get a partner and stand face to face.
2. Start moving in a slow fashion and have your partner follow you. Use simple and slow movements, avoid movements that remove eye contact with your partner (e.g. turning your back etc.)
3. Switch roles with your partner by taking on the follower role with your partner as leader.
When you do this, I recommend using slow flowy music.
One of the most common exercises in improvisation is the Unison. It trains dancers how to feel each other and move as a group. Unison exercises develop a heightened awareness in dancers for the movements of their co-performers.
In it's basic form, a unison exercise starts off with a leader in front who moves in a slow fashion. As soon as the leader faces the sides or turns about, the most forward person in that direction becomes the leader. The leadership changes as the leader changes the position he/she faces. The great thing about unison is that you can also add the elements of variation and succession which we use in mirroring. If a dancer has learned how to do mirroring, unison should not be that difficult.
While this improvisation exercise benefits dancers a lot, non-dancers have a lot to gain as well. For one, the awareness to non-verbal cues allows participants to be sensitive to the movement of the group as a whole. By constant exposure, this awareness can grow to a point that a person can carry that same sensitivity into the work setting and other non-dance environments. Considering that most communication is non-verbal, an organization with its members adept in unison and other improvisational exercises would certainly be a highly effective team. For this to work, it would be great is the whole organization regularly gets into a unison exercise to be able to explore and experiment on interdependency relationships between team members.
Unison exercises train teams to function organically without any verbal communication. I also teaches how to adjust with leadership changes. In a nutshell a unison activity is a good simulation for developing co-worker interaction. Perhaps, these exercises are a great preventive to common place personality clashes in the work place.
For the last three weeks I have been working with my students on Mirroring. The goal is to introduce them to the practice of improvisation in the hopes of developing their ability to express themselves beyond mere technique of Classical vocabulary.
The first week we did our mirroring, I had my students find a movement phrase by exploring a door frame with their extremities. They then rehearsed these phrases and used these as the basis of their phrase when leading the mirroring exercise. On the second week, I had them start our in a similar fashion looking for a movement phrase from a door frame. When we did our mirroring exercise, I introduced the concept of variation. I had the leader repeat a phrase 3 times and instructed the follower to vary segments of the phrase according to height, direction,etc.
This week, I had the dancers create their phrases as they were doing the mirror. The movement they had was completely unrehearsed. As they got the hang of it, the concept of succession was introduced. The leader was instructed to do a segment of a phrase in sharp sudden movement followed by a pause. The follower then followed the phrase segment to the best of his/her ability.
After a few tries, I introduced my dancers to structured innovation. I instructed them to start mirroring from one side of the room moving across to the opposite side. At a certain point, the dancers were to do mirroring with variations and at another point the mirroring with successions. Below is a video of their first stab at structured improvisation.
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.
