This week’s research was based on the head and how the weight of your head, which is surprisingly heavy!, influences how you are able to connect with someone else in contact. We began the lesson by watching two videos, one by Blake Nellis and Brando, and the other one by Steve Paxton. Although both these videos were examples of contact improvisation, it was amazing how obviously different they were. ‘Earthdance’ (2010) was very based on weight placement, and quite slow placed. It was almost as if both dancers knew exactly where the next one would end up, although we know this is next to impossible in contact!! This movement placement was similar to ‘Magnesium’ (1972), but the difference between the control of the dancers seemed to be huge. In Paxton’s piece, it felt like people were almost throwing each other about and just hoping someone would be there to catch them. Whereas in Nellis & Brando’s piece, weight control was smooth and never used suddenly.
Through ‘Steve Paxton’s Interior Techniques’ I realised what it might look like ‘to achieve free, spontaneous movement’ (Turner, 2012, 126). In Magnesium, the dancers were using this free- flow movement, and although it could be messy at times, you could see the dynamics of the piece. Their ‘free movement’ would turn into a knock on effect to the next dancer, and they would start portraying the movement in the way that they had begun to feel it. As they were rolling and moving through the floor, you could see the dancers begin to take notice of specific body parts, and they would then concentrate on those for the next part of the phrase. As their contact began to get more rapid, the dancers started grabbing onto each others wrists and other body parts in order to create balance and counter- balance. In Earthdance you saw a use of all the body parts, in fact I don’t remember the two dancers ever really avoiding any parts of their body, contact was used everywhere. They also had a larger use of lifts and levels, which meant that a lot of balances also began to really travel. It also flowed so much that you couldn’t tell when one move ended and the next one started. These two pieces of contact taught me a lot, and I would really like to be able to get to that level of stability in contact during these research labs.
‘Dancers would get to know each other very well, developing trust and awareness of themselves and their dance partners’ (Turner, 2012, 127). This was certainly true in the first exercise we did in class, which involved being with a partner and being completely in control of their head! I went first as Millie began to lift my head and mould it slightly to the way she felt she wanted me to move. The vulnerability of someone holding your head was quite daunting and although I trusted Millie, it was still very hard to give the whole weight of my head to her. I did find that this exercise helped me break habitual movements, with Millie moving my head, I found interesting the ways I was able to move. At one point she rolled my head downwards to the floor and as all my body followed the sense of release was amazing.
When we switched to me holding Millie’s head however, I saw the massive responsibility of holding someone else’s head. It took a while for me to be able to pick up her head and actually fully trust myself with it. As she began to move it was interesting to see how the weight of the head not being held by her and that I was actually able to manipulate where and how she moved.
I realised from this task that there is a big difference from improvising with the use of the head and then improvising without. When we began improvising with different people starting from the movement of just the head, it was strange to see how you connected with some people and not others. I also found if difficult to use the lower half of my body to improv, using your head movement seems to flow more. Once I got up I found it tricky to change my habits of wanting to go back down to the floor again, which i definitely deemed as ‘safer’. My task for this week’s improvisation is to make sure I get used to using my legs, as I can’t always rely on the use of my arms and head in order to improvise.
I thoroughly enjoyed this lesson however and am excited for what next week’s task has to offer!
Turner, R. (2010) Steve Paxton’s ‘Interior Techniques’: Contact Improvisation and Political Power. TDR: The Drama Review, 54(3), 123-135.
Nelson, L. (dir.) (2006) Contact Improvisation Archive DVD #2: Magnesium, Peripheral Vision, Soft Pallet. [DVD] East Charleston: VIDEODA.
Aaron Brando (2010) Contact Improvisation: Blake Nellis and Brando @ Earthdance. [Online Video] Available from:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQRF2sLK1vY [Accessed 11 October 2015].