We spent most of this class going back to ideas that our teacher thought that we should look at in order to complete our knowledge of Contact Improvisation before beginning looking at scores. We firstly looked at the idea of push again but this time including the hips in the movement, I found this difficult to do at first, but once I had practiced it a few times it became easier. This idea of sending the hips into the space became important for what we looked at next. We worked in pairs with the idea of one person being the base who had to make different surfaces for their partner to use, the ‘over dancer’ had to try and use the push action to send their hips onto their partner. We had practiced moving our hips on and off our partner before however, using the idea of pushing you had to try and get to your destination quickly, adding dynamic quality into your duet. After both partners experimented with this we had to repeat the exercise using our feet as the body part to send onto our partner. I enjoyed experimenting with the idea of sending a body part directly and quickly to my partner. I found high levels quite challenging but possibly the most enjoyable of levels to work with as I had to push myself and completely trust my partner. The level I disliked was a very low level as I found that there wasn’t any room to spring to your partner, therefore a middle level was my most comfortable but I enjoyed pushing myself at that higher level.

After this we experimented with another lift, I found this lift much easier that other ones which we had previously explored as both the lifter and the person being lifted. I found it easier as the ‘under dancer’ for this as it required leg strength more than other types of strengths which I found much more comfortable. Moreover, as the ‘over dancer’ I found it challenging but very enjoyable which helped me to keep motivated whilst practicing this lift. I found that this lift more than others, required a lot of core strength for the ‘over dancer’ and I really had to think of reaching my extremities away from my centre in order to keep my balance whilst on the back of my partner.

The second part of our class consisted of us working on our chosen score. As a group we chose to explore further some of the ideas which we had explored in our research labs from the week before, we decided to look at controlling space in terms of levels and special content, speed and from the other group who we joined with their idea of creating interesting and difficult ways to travel between levels. This idea suited our group well as that was one thing in which we wanted to improve from our research lab. In order to help us create our score we looked at ‘Some Considerations When Structuring an Improvisation (to be seen by an audience)’ by Jamie Stover, in this small text he asked questions such as ‘Do I want to create a mechanistic Newtonian framework, sitting over the dancer like a compressional structure, OR…do I want a relative structure which reflects changes which have occurred as part of the unravelling of the dance in time and space?’ (Stover, 1989, 185). We considered all the questions raised like the one before in order to help structure and formulate our score. When testing our score at the end of class it became evident that elements of it needed changing in order to engage and involve the audience more.

Stover, J. (1989) Some Considerations When Structuring an Improvisation (to be seen by an audience). Contact Quarterly/ Contact Improvisation Sourcebook II, 14, 185.