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.
Albert Einstein once defined Insanity as doing the same things over and over again but expecting different results. The reality is that in our daily lives, insanity seems to be the norm. Whether its Business or at Home we find ourselves doing the same things over and over again, following the same line of thinking that got us into the problem in the first place. It is a challenge for everyone to go off tangent and approach a situation for a different angle.
As a Physicist and Engineer, I had to face similar situations that would have led to dead end scenarios. I am thankful for my Ballet training, having equipped me with a set of mental tools to develop my creativity. I had an easier time thinking of crazy ideas because of creative experiences I've had in the past.
A pivotal moment in my dance training was when I took a course in Improvisation under Agnes Locsin, Cultural Center of the Philippines Awardee for Dance. It was here that I learned to explore the use of my body and find new approaches to its use. Specifically, I learned how I can move my arms and my legs in novel ways that were beautiful to behold and felt good to me, the performer.
Do you need to have any dance training to improvise and explore the use of your body? No. As a matter of fact, those who do not have any dance training are able to explore better because they do not have any movement biases. It is more challenging for me to teach ballet dancers Improvisation because they are so concerned about technique.
So how does one start improvisation. One way is to write your name with a specific part of your body. ( I will save this interesting exercise for another post. ) Another way, is by Mirroring. In this exercise, 2 performers face each other with one designated as leader and the other as follower. The leader moves a part of his/her body slowly with the follower copying the movement just like a mirror image. Being challenged by my students ballet mindset, I started the exercise by having the leader do 2 movement phrases of 8 counts each, which I just improvised. The follower was to do the usual following as the leader did my phrases. This was all done to establish the experience of being leader and follower among the dancers.
Having established the relationship between follower and leader, I then had the latter create her own phrase. AS expected, her fear of technical incorrectness led her to make conservative hand moments. At this point, I directed the leader to go to a door frame in the studio and try to make movement that related to the frame. I told her to explore moving at different levels. My only constraint was for her to move in a slow, steady manner. After she found her movement phrases, I had the leader go back to her pair and introduced the additional constraints of not turning her back to the follower. I had the leader 16 counts of her own movement before eliminating my movement phrases. It was a pleasant suprise for my dance to have created her own movement. After completing the exercise. I had the leader/follower roles switched. Below is a video clip showing the mirroring exercise done by my students for Acts Manila @ Life N Arts Sta Rosa Laguna.
