Friday, September 2, 2016

Friday Morning Moves - 2nd September



Clare on Chair, Alyx on floor with broom, val on Broom

Today we start with balls, squishy, small, large, harder, spiky, smooth, a range of balls that allow us to find ways to squish our selves, roll, breathe and sound on to and into the object we have picked. The sounds vibrate into and through the objects and back into ourselves as we move. Sounds evolve into syllables and pre-words. Sounds and objects and people join, to sound and breathe into each other.

Dead body exercise follows, and we invite people to be curious, to research a person's body, it's densities, textures, movement pathways, tendencies, finding out about it's structures and qualities through our own body and it's own structures. Four people give one person an experience of their body, opening up space and sensation. We discussed the experience of this work and the expansiveness of our experience through touch, the aliveness that comes through manipulation and the invitation to just observe and feel rather than do or try. I found the differences of touch and sensation happening throughout my body to be interesting in that this created a more 'total' body experience, where no one body part or sensation had dominance over another. 

Some contact improvisation work activates us in a more active way with one person using the other as a surface and structure to explore their peripheral and then their 'core' bodies, then swapping roles. 

This exercise leads to individual explorations of kinesphere, core relationships using circles, spirals and movement into and out of the floor, upside down and up again. 

A game of stay close to but don't touch another person ensues, with addition of compulsory swearing every time you do touch.

Jiggling jogging, then finding different surfaces of feet to experiment with in relation to the rest of your body, moving into specific toes and fingers leading movement around kinesphere. Being specific about how each specific part shifts the rest of the body's movement possibility.

Object play with things from the hall and things we'd brought. The initial task was to use an object in a way it's not made for, notice how you are using it, repeat it on both sides, then take the object away and repeat. Move to another object and repeat

Then, take one object, repeat the task, and then instead of starting the explorations again with another object, repeat the action from that last one but transfer it to a new object. Keep transferring the original object action to new objects, and then eventually accumulate information from each object to carry on with in the next interaction. 

Witnessing in pairs, interact with a few objects then come back to the original object.

Reflections from object play:
For me, there was an interesting kind of architecture created through the objects and bodily interactions. Interesting to just see people repeating an action regardless of object, yet each object distorting, shifting, rearranging bodies according to the specificities of the object's structure and materiality. Some people found that they were kind of 'bored' when they were doing the task. In watching it though there was much more interest. Others found that there was an intense sensorial experience that was interesting, but actually watching it may have been more boring. We discussed how the 'inside' and 'outside' experiences of performing and performance are not necessarily correlated. I think this could be especially so of contact and somatic practices, where the inquiry is often intensely personal, experiencing sensation and feeling through movement (or stillness).

Thinking about Object sensory explorations, densities of touch explorations, object chakras and healing objects....

 
  



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