This week involved a large amount of trust between you and the other people with whom you are dancing. We began with trusting someone to lead you around the room while you were blind. When we discussed our findings, myself and my partner both revealed that we felt very tense when this was happening, feeling like you were going to crash or walk off the edge of a cliff. Although there were some occasions when I had no sense of where I was in the room, at the end, due to the other use of my senses, I knew exactly where I was stood. I felt that my use of listening had become much stronger, as I was using the sounds in order to work out what was happening and that I would be safe. This was explained in through the quote ”

From this we moved into bigger groups and one person stood with their eyes closed and the others surrounded them. The middle person fell and the outside people caught them and sent them back to someone else. I found this quite difficult to do at first. I, like many other people was afraid of being dropped or too heavy for the other people to support my weight. After a while it becomes easier and it’s not so much of a struggle to stay relaxed. ‘one of the essential aspects to teaching falling is retraining our instinctual experience of gripping or holding our breath when we feel our bodies loosing their grounding.’ (Albright, 2009). In order to do this successfully , the body needs to be relaxed and calm, this is something which is not easy when falling as it puts us in a situation which has caused pain in previous experiences.

Much of this workshop involved giving and taking weight from a partner. We played with resistance and counter-pulling, leaning away and balancing in a seating position as well as using the other person to stand up together. As was pointed out in the discussion at the end, contact doesn’t always flow. There were moments when it felt very disjointed and there were pauses in which you were trying to think of what to do or where to go next. I think it is important to remember at first that it is not always going to feel natural, there will be moments which feel uncomfortable or possibly put you in a compromising position. It is navigating your way around these experience which help you to go further with these explorations, giving you more confidence and a greater understanding of how you, and others move.

Works Cited

Albright, Ann Cooper. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 2009, Vol. 1 Issue 2, p143-153