June 28, 2007

Capturing the Essence of Movement

Elizabeth Johnson , associate artistic director at Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, taught part of the "Generating and Crafting" program yesterday.

She started with mirroring exercises. We broke up into to pairs and then one person's entire body would follow the movement of the other person's hand. Then we transitioned to free-form mirroring where we mirrored the exact movements of the other person. Finally, we did a time-delayed mirroring. I found following in this exercise very challenging because at any given point, your movements were the ones performed by your partner a few seconds ago and you had to keep watching your partner to see what she was doing in the present. But I really enjoyed the leading in this exercise. For some reason my improvised movements seemed to come very easily.

Next we worked on what Elizabeth called an Essence-ing exercise -- essentially, a way to both generate movement and edit movement in very quick order while working with a partner.

We partnered again. The first person would improvise for about 15 seconds. The next person would then dance what they just saw as best as they could. Then the first person would do the same for what they had just seen the second person dance. The second person might have done this one more time.

Then continuing to work with our partner, we converted what we had just created/edited into a short routine.

Next we repeated this entire process so the second person started improvising a new piece and then we followed all of the steps above.

At the end, we had two short routines - one's own and that of the person we were working with.

Next, working alone each person in the class created their our dance by combining and editing the two routines we had just created.

Finally, we got back with our partners and created a duet based upon the solo works that we had just made.

This essence-ing exercise is an excellent way to generate movement very quickly and to start editing a piece more out of necessity than actively thinking about what you want to remove - this especially is the case when you watch your partner improvise and you have to replicate what you just saw. I was only able to remember a handful of basic movements that my partner danced so I was editing simply by not being able to recall.

The duet section at the end of this exercise was interesting because you first got to see how your partner took the two routines you had made together, and integrated and edited them. Then, once we danced our own routines at the same time, it was intriguing to see overlaps and variations of the same movements that we had worked on when we created our two initial routines. Then we continued to work on our duet and perform them for the class.

In the afternoon Liz Lerman focused on creating form and structure for a dance work we are each creating based on the movement we've generated over the past three days. I'll write about this section of the institute in the next few days. I want to get a better grasp on how to go about creating a form for your dance piece.

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