Dance Phrase 3 pictures of difficult movements

This position is done on the RIGHT version of the phrase. As I am havint balance on my left arm I find it difficult. This is why I usually keep my foot on the floor as in this picture in order to focus on keeping my hips in parallel to the floor and keep my head to tail connection without twisting out of place.

Sometimes, if I have my balance slightly better I do begin to take my foot off the floor but I would rather keep it on the floor than go out of enlignment.

This is me on the LEFT version of the phrase I find it so much easier to do it on this side and don't hesitate in taking my foot of the floor. My lower back has quite an arch to it so I need to be more careful in positions like this.

This is me doing the backwards roll as I mentioned in the previous post for Dance Phrase 3 you can see how I can't get the lower part of my left arm on the floor. The lower picture shows the other side with the same problem.

Dance Phrase 3

This is a phrase that we have been doing in Studio Practise with Andrea Barzey. This is just showing the right version of the phrase. I generally like learning phrases and have quite a good memory for phrases and pick them up fairly quickly. Despite this I am not particularly fond of this sequence. The phrase itself is nice to perform as it flows quite well and looks closely at the head to tail connection. However, I have so many difficulties due to my left arm. Most of the phrase I'm fine with yet there are two specific movements that I struggle with. The first can be seen at 29 seconds. We have to balance on our same arm/ leg with our other arm/leg lifted. When we do it on the right side i have to balance on my left side. Because I can't straighten my left arm and the placement at the shoulder isn't quite right i can't take my weight. At first I twisted my hips to compensate so I could lift my right leg. But after thinking about the head to tail connection I decided that it would be more beneficial to me if i left my foot on the ground and kept my pelvis parallel to the ground.
The other movement is the backwards roll seen at 38 seconds. For this roll we are meant to slowly take our legs above and over and head and use our hands/arms to push us slowly and gently over rather than using force to get us over. However. my arm prevents me from being able to do this. When I am in this position I am unable to put most of my arm on the floor, meaning I am unable to push myself over. In order to work around this I do have to rely on some force to get me over.
Although, I am so self-concious about this phrase, when I have partnered up to get feedback for the movement they are always surprised by my attitude as to them they don't think I'm doing it much different to everyone else. This has made me realise that although I may be painfully aware of my arm others don't actually notice it that much.

Above is part of my notes from one of the studio classes.

Duet Feedback

On Friday 11th March, me and Alex had our duet progress showing. We performed what we had of our duet infront of our peers and tutor Katye Coe. The main thing I find helpful with progress showing is that we recieve feedback. We asked whether our idea of indivuality was clear throughout the piece and also if our choreographic processes worked. The general feedback we recieved informed us that our idea is quite clear throughout and our choreographic process with the phrases is a really clear structure. Katye also gave us some very useful feedback: she said she felt the contact improvisation was a red herring and that we should focus on repeating and developing our movement. I agree with this as I now feel that the contact work didn't sit as well with our ideas. She also informed us that just by running through the space we were showing our differences which we hadn't even thought about due to its simplicity. Another point was that the movement was too much like the phrases we do in studio practice and that we need to move away from this movement into something more complex. We chose something simple so that we coulod focus more on developing it however I agree that we could make it more complex and more our own material that has more of a meaning behind it.
Other ideas to think about was 'costume' . Katye suggested it would be interesting if we had different layers of clothing on and as we repeat and develop the movement we take a layer off. We could begin with same colours and then this changes as we change the movement to show our personality. I really liked this idea because one of the words we chose to begin with was colour which we can tie in with this. And also adding in speech. I'm not sure of the speech idea as I wouldn'tknow what to say but I guess once we develop our duet that might change.

SO.AN-J DUET DANCE PHRASE DEVELOPED

This is the developed version of the phrase allowing some of individuality through. We both liked the idea of this choreographic process. Our idea is to continue to develop it so that we can repeat the phrases with subtle differences showing our individuality more and more each time. We don't exactly know how it will turn out yet whether the phrase will end up changing completely so that we end up doing completely different movements or...?

SO.AN-J DUET DANCE PHRASE

Another choreographic process we tried out to carry on with the idea of individuality was to produce a dance phrase together and then go away and develop it seperately. This is the first version where we did it as similar as possible to the original phrase. There are still of course some differences but in general we look fairly similar.

SO.AN-J Contact Improvisation

This is a clip of some contact improvisation we tried out. We tried to maintain our own individuality whilst working closely with each other. We both liked the work but were unsure of whether it sat well with the ideas we were looking at. After gettin feedback from our progress showings we agrred with our peers that it was probably 'a red herring' Katye Coe. We have decided to focus more on our other choreographic processes.

Individuality

For our duet the thing that still intrigues us the most is the idea of individuality. How one person can be completely different from the other, in personalities, likes and dislikes, perspectives...Can individuality be maintained during a duet consisting of two different people? Is anything lost because of this? We began to work through different choreographic processes we could use to show off our uniqueness or possibly our lack due to a duet. We did various things: Contact Improvisation; can we keep our individuality in such close proximity to another? Working with a same phrase and then going away and developing it ourselves before coming back together and seeing the differences. We also went to the same place and drew our own scores on what we could see, feel, hear etc. We then worked seperately but together with improvisation based on our scores. What I found the most interesting about this was when we did this in a studio we both ended up choosing the floor as our stimulus from our score. Yet, whilst I chose the patterns of the wood and worked with these, Alex worked with the surface of the floor and how smooth it is.

Words for our duet

For part of our choreographic process of our duets, we looked at choreographic devices and in our pairs chose ones that stood out to us. The 2 main ones that we both chose were colour and perspective. Perspective in particular stood out to us in the way people can be in the exact same situation but react or percieve it completely differently. From perspective comes many different strands such as individuality/ their identity/personality. Colour can reflect that. Why do people have favourite colours? Why is it they're favourite colour? Why do people react differently to colours? These both interested us and it would be interesting to base our choreographic process around this.

Photos for my body story

Excuse the faces! So whilst I was doing my body story I decided it would be a good idea to take some photos of my left arm to show people the lack of rotation/straightening of the arm. The pics with me in the GREY top were took just after the Christmas hols (the first week back) I noticed in class how my arm seemed stiffer than before and was bothering me slightly more than before Christmas so I took photos from the left side and front and decided to take some photos at the end of Jan/ Feb time and see if there was a difference.

My arm never 'feels' different. I guess I do notice if I have more movement that normal but it never hurts. Yet, obviously my arm does change depending on how much exercise I am doing. I have come to the conclusion that I really need to take time in my breaks to maintain my arms movement range. Although exercise does improve straightening, physios say the lateral rotaion form the radio-ulna will never improve without operation and there's no guarentee an operation will help anything. I guess for now I'll just have to keep doing what I'm doing.

Images from Skinner Releasing Technique

These are my writings and images from the Skinner Releasing Technique. The top one is a page from my journal. I have come to realise that for my journal I like to have mainly written form but with drawings to visualise certain images or positions etc. During this Skinner class the main things taht stood out to me was the idea of marinette strings and puppets and how this can elongate your movement as well as making you more aware about the idea of a floating skull during movement.

The next two images are our reflections at the end of some Skinner classes. I find it interesting that although some of the writings or drawings are similar/the same ideas, I had a different understanding of them. In the first couple of lessons we looked at the strings and breath through the body but it wasn't until the last couple of lessons that my understanding if that changed and developed so that those images meant more to me than before.