I have just discovered that it is no longer considered politically correct to use the term 'brain storm' and todays lingo should be 'thought shower'. However, as usual, this weeks session coincided with more of a storm than a shower outside of the studio!
This week we were a few people down due to the weather and illness but still managed to produce more choreographic material to add to the pot (participants keep an eye on vimeo for the footage). The focus was on solo material and was developed from our 'thought shower' about how we interpret community and the roles we all play withing them.
Prior to our choreographic explorations though we kicked off in a circle with clapping and rhythm games before creating mini body percussion orchestras. The individual rhythm patterns sounded surprisingly good when put together although it was quite difficult to remember them with everyone else around sounding out something different!
To get us moving in the space we used some ideas Ana (a participant) had suggested. Looking at the concept that there are 'moves where all human beings interact on a basic level irrelevant of origin, race, colour or nationality' we thought more about how we communicate and greet each other. Using movements relating to a welcome or greeting from different cultures we created a spatial warm up including a high 5, bow, hug, handshake and pat on the back (only a few of many but a good place to start?).
After recapping the phrase of movement taught by Beth we learnt 3 walking phrases that we improvised with as a group (see vimeo) to get our creative juices flowing!
In two groups we took a break from dancing to discuss how we each interpreted the term 'commmunity' and what it meant to us. These were some of the thoughts:
Community means:
- People
- Social networking - expanding communities - no longer local - now global community
- Diversity
- Links
- Identity within the community
- Belonging
- stages of life (community changes)
- safety
- Isolated (cliquey)
- Familiar
- Common ground
- support network
- neighbours, work, home, friends, family, hobby, religion, school
- transport - bike vs tube vs car!
- roots
- judgemental/confinement
- coming together
- differences - made up of differences
- culture - different cultures together
- shared space and values
- help and support
- passing of information and word of mouth - verbal community
- structured (school) vs unstructured (youth worker)
- attitude - different perspectives (inclusion vs exclusion)
- Identity - within yourself
- need time to come together
- understanding of commoness (different in different situations)
- Experience and memories
- building/developing/growing
- claustraphobic as well as free
- grounding
This discussion led us onto the roles that we each play in our community or communities. Beth asked us to each write one role down on a piece of paper and put it into a communal bag. Each dancer then took a role out and created a movement in response to it (not descriptive in a charades style!). We then repeated this process three times until each dancer had a solo phrase of movement consisting of each role response. The roles were quite entertaining! See below:
- Volunteer at battersea dog and cats home (I stroke cats)
- Squash games organiser
- Rehabilitation
- Role model
- (meeting point) "meeter"
- Housemate
- Co-passenger
- Peace Keeper
- Problem Solver
- Uni project writer
- Aunt
- Mum
- Student
- Leader
- Member
I wish I knew who had written each one! Beth and I were very impressed with the very creative and beautiful solos created.
We have a lot to recap on tonight.
Let's hope we have more showers of thought and fewer showers of rain......
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