This week was a research lab in which we came prepared with questions and tasks in order to investigate the areas which we wanted to focus on. Before I explain the findings, I think it is important to know that I feel that in order to be successful and take a lot from contact improvisation, you have to be in the right mind set. As much as I tried, due to injuries and other things, I found I struggled to fully get into the state in which I was open enough to fully explore. The questions I looked at were:

1. How can you find the balance between letting go and remaining in control during momentum?

Letting go is something which I as well as many others have found, can be hard when trusting people with whom you are dancing so closely. There is a certain amount of letting go which is required in order to make movements easier, tensing can lead to more injuries. However there is also an element of control which is needed in order to help with the situation. When being lifted, you can do things such as keeping your core engaged in order to help the person who is lifting, as well as to maintain balance when in the lift.

We found this question particularly difficult to answer with the tasks which we chose. As we only had a limited amount of space and three dancers at the time, we found it difficult to make the material flow and progress enough to make any major discoveries. We found that gaining momentum can be difficult, however it also raised the further question of whether momentum and a fast speed have to go hand in hand together. Momentum is defined as “the quantity of motion of a moving body, measured as a product of its mass and velocity.” (Google). At no point in this definition does it say that there has to be a fast pace, something which we don’t always remember.

2. How do you put somebody down safely and without risk of injury?

We often think about how we are going to arrive into a lift successfully and safely, however we often don’t give as much though to the decent.  We used exploration of other body parts such as legs, arms, pelvis and the head instead of just your centre. The hands can be used in order to help guide the person to safety. Relaxation is important, softening means less shock and stress on the joints. If you think about it and use your initiative the task becomes easier. We have natural instincts in order to protect ourselves which can be used in contact, our bodies are very clever and know how to work in that situation.  You should think about both yourself and the other person. It is a two way conversation through the bodies in order to successfully return the weight safely to the floor.

3. How can we be connected and manipulate one another during improvisation without  physical contact?

We found that this type of contact had a much more playful element to it. When experimenting with this task myself and Sophie played with the idea of the thick skin. Moving around and through each other without touching. I found this to be much more enjoyable, reminding me of children playing games instead of thinking about whether it looks good to an audience. There was a kind of question and answer between the dancers asking where they wanted to go and what to try next. I found that although we were not connected physically, I felt a kind of connection between myself and the other person, almost like a magnet which kept us connected. Due to this playful and relaxed state, it allowed for much more freedom within the movement however to an outside eye the connections could still be seen. This was my favourite area which we looked at, I felt the most at ease with these tasks.

4. How can we maintain speed while creating new material?

Speed when dancing can feel very different to different people as I found on this task. When myself and Leonie had danced together we found that she felt that we had significantly altered the speed when we were told to change, however I felt that it had stayed on a constant level. Because of this, although I had on one occasion tried to make the movements faster, Leonie had resisted as she felt that she was already going faster. We used the words fast forward, slow motion and rewind on pieces of paper picked out at random in order to change the speed. These commands meant that you had to think instantly on the spot. We found that when the fast forward command was given the dancers would pause and readjust themselves in order to carry on, however this was not the case for the other commands. We found it easier to already have an idea of where you wanted to go and then allow whatever happens to happen naturally.

From these questions we drew up some conclusions. We found that many of the findings which resulted from the tasks for different questions all overlapped and interlinked. There wereseveral occasions where a task for one question helped us to answer another. We also found that although our work was successful in finding some answers, we were limited some what because of the small group size. It may be that if these tasks were expanded upon with a bigger group, with more opportunities to explore and discover, that other, greater findings would be discovered.