Friday Morning Moves - 16th September

This week's theme turned out to be kidney's and lungs. Seems that these things find themselves within the movement and exercises that we end up doing. Starting with a loose MandB format moving through the room in relation to partners bodies we end up finding the lines between kidneys and feet and lungs and hands. This turns out to be food for most of the session, including individual and partnered explorations of each organ and their relationship.

Clare's really interested in handstands at the moment, and so we move into a repeated flow designed to turn us upside down and get us on to our hands. We end up with three people supporting the fourth to do a handstand with information from the supporters focussing again on the kidneys, lungs and related limbs. The experience of these supported and aligned handstands is pretty awesome, and a real sense of light groundedness emerges.

I've been playing with water and balloons for quite a while now, stemming from my masters research at AUT, and thought I'd separate them out into two different object experiences, with hot water bottles full of hot/warm water, and balloons full of air. First with the bottles, I invite people to think of them as people, exploring them through the different depths of their body, tissues, organs, bony structures, then thinking how they might be experiencing your body as a sensory/movement experience. We move for a while and then join with another person, to make a four 'person' improvisation, giving our bottles and ourselves opportunities to experience the different textures, temperatures and sensations of our bodies and play.

Bottles are then left, and we start to use the balloons as a rolling point of contact between partners. The particular lightness and fragility of the balloons is a nice experience of the attention needed to successfully partake in a contact relationship, and this one seems to have a life and a mind of its own, as the balloon is rather unpredictable at times. With more balloons added into the mix, we are challenged to be ever more present, and always moving, over, around, under, through ourselves and each other. A very fun score.

Lastly, the balloons are used to give a partner a light, yet sure experience of the boundaries of their body as they lie on the ground, and then move with the balloon tracing, informing and being lead by the movement.

Gratitude to all who were present, and the space that allows such spacious play!

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....

 
  

26 August 2016

Clare rolled around the studio for most of the morning whilst I was attending to my daughter...

When I got there we played with 'domestic' interactions of objects, noticing movement patterns and bodily co-ordinations, then moving these co-ordinations, patterns and movements around the room, abstracting them out and playing with object-body interactions and characters.

We then played a made up game, which consisted of: only being allowed to sweep a small spiky ball with brooms at the same time as only being allowed to kick a larger squishier Pilates ball around the room. Both of us had brooms but were chasing the same balls... a lot of laughing and remembering why people like to play ball games.

Lastly, we set up an 'object' obstacle contact course, which we approached from one end each. I was enjoying the different textures and densities of the objects, the way in which they became second, third or fourth 'partners', who were at once both less predictable, or maybe less 'known' as a body, but also more passive in their trajectories. They still all had their own movement qualities, affordances, ways of responding or not, that seemed to be endlessly interesting.

These tasks were felt to be fruitful and would be something to explore more.