This week we danced from images. What was your experience of dancing from concrete ideas? Did it change the way your body did the movement? Did it change your dancing experience in any way?
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About Me
- Louis
- My efforts toward enlightenment through creativity and physicality are what my dances and my teaching are all about.
Kimberly Redding
ReplyDeleteWhen I first danced from images, I found my body to be more rigid and less expressive than in other combinations/classes. However, when I put a story behind the image, my body changed again. Sometimes Louis would put the story to the image, like when he told us about the crab apple tree and taking one bite and throwing the apple over the fence. Sometimes I would make it up in my mind, like with the Pelican movement, I imagined catching a fish, holding it for a moment, and then offering is to another selflessly. I didn’t do as well with simply trying to embody the image, but felt more confident and enjoyed the movement more when I imagined the story. When we did the dolphin movement I imagined I was a dolphin rushing to play with friends in the waves. I just had a thought; maybe the only way to embody such an image is to make a story. Without a story in my mind to go with the image, nothing else carries the movement; it’s dead and lifeless. It becomes “just” a dance in which I try to “get it right.” This is how I felt the first time I did these combinations, lifeless but then I found stories that gave life to the images and it was really fun dancing them. I felt like a storyteller, but instead of reading the childrens book, I was dancing it.
I think I came in from this at a different angle, I was sick on wednesday, so I only had one day of images. I was somewhat confused at first because I was set on learning the combination and not fully considering what was meant by a noodle jump. It took me one or two times doing the combination to realize that the imagery of the noodle was probably the focus of the combination. I really liked the Arora Borealis. I have done movement countless times before on one leg moving my arms and other leg, but the imagery made me think less which allowed my movement to feel more elongated. The dolphin jump, swoop, thing was a bit weird for me. I understood what was supposed to happen and to an extent I saw where it could be a dolphin, but I felt tied around that idea when I wouldn't have thought of a dolphin for that movement.
ReplyDelete~Caitlin Bannan
I thought this was pretty neat. From a choreography stand point, I thought this was a great example of how you can get inspiration from all sort of places. In this case, the inspiration came from concrete ideas. From a dancer stand point, it’s a very different way of thinking I would go between thinking about how I would move if I were a particular object, and thinking about how I could help an audience picture a particular object... not always the same thing. For example, with the apple, it was all about how can I move so that the audience knows it’s an apple I’m biting and tossing... where with the banana, I WAS the banana... ah ha!
ReplyDeletebtw... my absolute favorite quote from the week “Who knew dolphins were the exact opposite from a pealed banana?” - :-D
~Casey
Dancing with images was fun, but my movement felt restricted at times, at least with the phrase with the banana and the dolphin. It probably felt this way because of the counts that went along with it, but I still felt like my body didn't want to go in certain directions very easily. It was hard for me to make the transitions feel good in my body, for example going from peeling the banana to the dolphin really wrenched on my back because it was fast and exaggerated movements. However, I felt much more free doing the dance with the rain and opening up your heart. Especially when we added the jumping component, I felt myself doing bigger movements, using all of the space around my body. The aurora borealis was a good balancing exercise, and it felt good to sort of lose control of my limbs and let them float around. Having the image of an aurora borealis in my head while doing this movement made a huge difference in the way that it felt in my body. If I were to do this movement without a feeling or phenomenon as inspiration, the movement would have much less emotion and focus.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed dancing from images. I think it made me more clear on my body placement. For example, when we did the banana move, I was not just arching my back with my hands by my sides, but rather I was being a peeled banana and thinking about this helped me visualize where my body should be because I wanted to look like a peeled banana not just an abstract thing. Also, thinking about being a dolphin made me lighter on my feet and visualizing a dolphin skimming the water made dancing way more fun and I felt like it made my dancing come alive. Also the abstractness of an aurora borealis made me really let go and feel like it was okay if my body was not in the perfect place and the perfect time. It made me feel like getting of my center and falling off my center was a good thing not a thing that is frowned upon. Putting concrete things to my dancing rather then just ideas and emotions also helped me remember which step came next and helped it flow better for me so in the future I might try to do this for myself! I love how many tools I have been given in this class and I will use them for the rest of my dancing career!
ReplyDeleteNicole
I loved the assignment from last week. Who knew that transforming images into a dance would be so fun? It definitely helps me to connect to the movement, but I find myself succumbing to the part of my brain that is concentrating solely on each individual image, and I forget how important transitions are. Being able to embody a physical thing, be it an animal or a natural occurrence, is quite a dangerous game because if you as the dancer feel like you are forming a banana with your body, does the audience see it that way? That kind of leads to the question of whether the dance is being danced for you and through you as the dancer, or it is being danced mainly for the visual pleasure of the audience. Overall, I think that dancing with concrete concepts was fascinating and really made me ask questions of myself as a dancer versus an audience member.
ReplyDeleteDancing from images this week was an interesting experience. Working with concrete ideas worked for me. I saw the image in my head and transformed it into movement. It seemed to come easier for me than something more abstract because I knew what the image looked like and I could try to imitate it with my body. I feel that with more abstract ideas it leaves me more room to think about what my body should be doing instead of knowing and just letting the movement happen. I had a lot of fun last week.
ReplyDeleteSorry. The last post was from Kali.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed dancing from images. I think it's fun to take concrete images and see everyone's different interpretations of them. An important part of that exercise was really committing to the images. Some of the concepts were kind of abstract, like the dolphin or the noodle, and if someone was dancing and not committed to his or her movement, it's possible he or she would be self-conscious and think that the movements are silly. I liked when Louis mentioned to really go for the noodle-y effect on the jumps because the more you commit to the movement, the better it feels and the more confident you end up feeling. For me, the odd part were the dolphin jumps; at first, I felt kind of weird jumping in the air, but once I decided to commit to the movement, it felt less weird.
ReplyDeleteI really like this exercise because sometimes it's hard to just dance by feeling. Sometimes it really helps to have an idea or a concept to portray to (presumably) the audience. Image dancing provides a bit of structure and sets a goal for you to achieve with your dancing, and I like that a lot.
- Allyson Wang
Attaching an image to a dance move didn’t feel so much like a challenge as I thought it would be. I felt as though the movement we were expected to do was actually enhanced by the images that we were later told to portray. The differences in the actual dancing part were subtle, but I think they helped with my thought process about how to approach the movement. It even made it more fun to do! I did, however, feel like I was hitting different poses. At least more than usual. I guess the connotation of the word “image” to me implies one stationary “picture” of something and not so much the actual item or creature in nature. I mean, when I imagined a banana, I just imagined a picture of a banana and made my body look like what I saw in my mind. Then when we went to the peeled banana part, I’d imagine what a peeled banana look like. Then the dolphin would be a picture of a dolphin jumping rather than the ACTION of the dolphin jumping. Hmmm…
ReplyDeleteNow that I’m really thinking about it, the whole apple thing differed a lot from the banana/dolphin part which differed even more from the aurora borealis part we added on later. With the apple idea, we were given a movement… a story behind it, even. I was able to apply that right away. With the banana/dolphin part, we talked about images which made me approach that part differently, for reasons I’ve already kind of mentioned. And for the aurora borealis part, we had an idea of what the phenomenon was and a pretty picture in our heads but I think the experience was different for those of us who had never seen any of that in real life (myself included). I think if we tried dancing these images again, I would approach them differently. Instead of thinking about pictures, I’d think more about what they would look like if they were in my presence and try to emulate the images they create rather than the images that I created of them in my own mind.
For me the experience of dancing with images was not all that different from any other combination. Whenever a teacher teaches me a combination I associate images with the movement. Sometimes because it helps me remember the movement and sometimes because it helps me embody it. Either way, dancing with an image is something that I usually do even if the choreographer doesn't hand me the specific image to work off of. It was interesting, however, to watch everyone embody the same images very differently. For example, the dolphin and the banana move was a very concrete image that we could each imagine clearly, yet every person had a different way of dancing the movement. I really enjoyed that choreography because it allowed each dancer to find themselves in the movement while still being a structured piece of choreography.
ReplyDelete-Jessica
I enjoyed this past week! It was cool that choreography was created based on our responses last week; the idea of using images to create movement or to represent something was a unique tool of choreography, that I had not thought of before. As far as the movement goes, the concrete ideas changed how I viewed and felt the choreography in my body. I also felt like I had a visual representation of the movement, like “throwing an apple over a fence” or “pealing a banana.” It also helped me understand the movement of an “aurora borealis,” by describing it before we did it, with terms like: flowing, unpredictable, wavy, and colorful. My body did experience the movement differently, I felt like I could become the object or sensation. But I did feel like I needed to get out of my head and just allow the movement to happen rather then, thinking this is how it is suppose to be done or this is exactly how it is suppose to look. Once I overcame that feeling, it was easier to do the choreography and feel the movement. I think it would be really intriguing to create a dance based on objects or sensations, that might also create or tell a story.
ReplyDelete-- Katelynn C.
This day of focusing on images was so much fun. I loved it. I liked being posy. Thinking of each image helped me focus on what I wanted my movements to be like. Being a banana and imagining being peeled was interesting. It made me think of being exposed. I was doing this later with my sister, and instead of stripping my peel straight down and out, I pedaled my arms down. Then we experimented with being a dolphin. This move gave me an idea for future choreography. In fact, experimenting with these images again at home made me realize how I can use this technique in choreographing dances. I loved this class!
ReplyDeleteDancing from images helped me a lot to remember the order of the combination as well as the quality of the movement. Hula is all about telling a story and dancing the image sung about in the song as well as its underlying meaning. It was good experience to translate that to modern dance.
ReplyDeleteI really liked dancing from the concrete images. I pictured peeling a banana when my body was doing the banana peeling movement. I really pictured a dolphin jumping out then back into the water right after the banana part. I really pictured launching the apple as far as it could fly. Really during that part I pictured throwing the apple over a huge fence with a huge St. Bernard on the other side like in the movie The Sandlot.
ReplyDeleteAll in all, I enjoyed my experience during the class where we learned the concrete image dance piece. I'm not sure if it appeared the way I imagined everything while dancing to the images. Also, I maybe feel like because I was imagining so literally all the images as I was moving to them, I maybe had a more inward focus when you wanted a more outward focus in all the directions the images were taking us. I know for sure the apple part I focused on a long distance while throwing it as far as I could.
That is a fun dance to visualize as well as move to. I'm a very visual person.
~Rashelllllle
Revisiting this information last week was very useful and interesting to me. I personally have a lot of trouble learning/internalizing choreography, but dancing from images made it so easy to characterize and linearize the movements. I want to take this practice and apply it to future learning of material - asking myself "What images can I associate with this movement?" Images helped me not only remember the shape and direction of our gestures, but qualities like height/spatial orientation, boundness vs. freeness.
ReplyDeleteThe notes you gave us about our noodles getting a little sloppy added another layer of possibility to dancing from images. I think that the reason we were getting too sloppy with our noodle movements is that we were 'letting the noodle take over,' if you will. The ability to dance from an image and reflect it in one's movement becomes ever more useful if we're empowered to apply the image to certain aspects of our dancing (maybe just shape or just height or just upper limbs), but allow other directions/images to govern other aspects. This further refinement takes the 'image dancing' and allows infinite choreographic complexity, but still roots the material in imaginable, learnable images - powerful, effective, useful. I will definitely take these strategies with me as I move along.
-Kristi