Emergent Improvisation
Solo Practice
“In my practice today I find myself moving between a series of fluid turns and sharp quick changes of direction. I play with the duration of each movement and my natural impulse to interrupt one action with its qualitative opposite. The turns are a response to the circular architecture of the space, while my sharp quick gesture emerges from an internal sense of timing. I become especially interested in the timing of how I shift between external and internal modalities, resulting in sensitivity to duration and rhythm. Suddenly my turns become sharper and quicker and are interrupted by moments of unexpected stillness.”
Solo Practice
Ensemble Practice
Emergent Forms
Solo Practice
The Solo Practice is a dynamic process of exploring movement as a way to build a kinetic philosophy and technical base unique to the individual. It is an open-ended practice of discovery and investigation that is “of the moment.” It focuses on developing a vocabulary that offers a wide range of movement choices to draw upon for expression. The ongoing development of a solo vocabulary allows the dancer to integrate new information and material and continually expand his or her range of possibilities. The emergent context developed by the Solo Practice is a microcosm of building on organic structuring principles with an ensemble.
Solo Practice is a nonlinear, non-hierarchical process involving four experiences:
Embodiment
Discovery of Movement Vocabulary
Attention to Spatial Environment
Focus on the Particular
Embodiment : Sensory Work
Embodiment in EI is a practice of attention that centers you in the present moment of your own physical and sensory reality. The process involves attuning oneself to the innate intelligence and felt experiences of the body through moving from breath, focus, still- ness, silence, and subtle movement or sound. We’ve adapted these practices from sources throughout the dance and body-work lexicon, such as Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Score with the senses, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s Body/Mind Centering principles, and texts such as Mabel Todd’s The Thinking Body, Deane Juhan’s Job’s Body, and Andrea Olsen’s BodyStories.
How do I feel in my body? How can I let go of my judgments about how I look? How can I stop thinking about whether a movement is good or bad, and accept that this is just how I feel like moving today? How do I give myself permission to feel pleasure in my movements?
Embodiment practices facilitate remaining present and responsive to the environment in one’s choice-making. Dancers cultivate and maintain an awareness of what is emerging at any given moment. In the ensemble practice this includes recognizing how one’s individual choices affect how the whole composition unfolds. This is fundamental to the experience of agency or individual choice within an ensemble.
The following are processes we have identified as helpful in achieving an embodied solo vocabulary. The intention is to become aware or “wake up” the vitality of the whole body before beginning a more directed or mapped accumulation of gestures and phrases of movement.
Body Scan: A body scan can be done lying on the floor or standing. Beginning with attention to breath, one notices sensation within the body parts—skeleton, muscle, and organs.
Body Mapping: This is a process of touch and focused attention. The intention is to feel and become aware of the volume, depth and length of body parts through self-massage or the touch of a partner, giving a felt sense of one’s own personal geometry.
Proprioception: Building on the body scan and body mapping, proprioception explores the body’s sense of balance and move- ment through space. One develops an anatomical knowledge through felt experience of one’s structural alignment, vision, weight, spatial location, and perception of one’s physical kine- sphere from where one can extend further into space. The feelings of how much effort it takes to shift one’s weight into a new position, how it feels to turn, and how the body rights itself after a fall are aspects of proprioception.
Tuning: This term comes directly from Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Score practices that approach studying composition and communication from the felt organization of the body within its environ
Discovery of Movement Vocabulary
Discovery begins with exploring one’s own movement choices through sensory awareness and memory, noting recurring patterns and spontaneous impulses. You allow your history of all of your training and dancing experiences to be continually rediscovered, reshuffled, and recombined. This endless creative process of discovery infuses the practice of EI.
The investigative process includes:
1. Attention to the issues of physical technique: balance, extension, vibration, gesture
(turns, falls, jumps), textures, and simple to complex phrasing.
2. Expanding range of articulation and expression through the practice of: initiating
impulses from different body parts; rhythmic patterns; musicality—phrasing and timing; deconstruction of phrasing— performing the same phrase with changes of level, focus, speed, texture, repetition, and retrograde; body geography—re-shaping the body as a sculptural, three-dimensional form; internal imagery.
3. Exploring energy states affecting dynamic levels of intensity while moving.
4. Exploring the anatomical system of the body fluids that affect the range of qualities
or textures in one’s movement as set forth in the work of Body-Mind Centering. E.g., the grounded quality of moving from cerebro- spinal fluid, the high energy aerobic quality of moving from the arterial blood.
Attention to Spatial Environment
Broadening attention from a focus on my internal compositional relation- ships to include an external awareness of self within the environment brings an awareness of location. What kind of space am I in? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it do to my focus? Can I see far out a window, or observe the patterns on the wall with my touch? I sense other people in the space, and how far or near they are to me. A multidimensional attention brings both an internal and external sense of time and space.
This attention includes: spatial orientation, boundaries, architecture, sound, light, temperature and energy.
Focus on the Particular
The narrowing and selection of particularities of movement for com- positional development is an ongoing refining process. It is an exploration of dimensions and scale, edges and range, and depth and scope through various dynamics. A particular choice can lead to various kinds of development, e.g., an exploration of repetition, phrasing, or assembling patterns. It might involve attending to beginnings and endings of phrase material, exploring narratives and images, or referencing previously articulated gestures or movements. Focusing on the particular helps one be specific and selective in the development of one’s movement vocabulary and way of structuring movement patterns.
Emergent Structures for the Solo Practice
In the solo practice we define emergent structures as patterns that arise within the exploration of movement phrasing. The soloist builds the capacity to identify the name recurring patterns of development. By repeating these patterns, we find variation and range in movement vocabulary and relationship to the environment. Patterns emerge, morph, dissolve, and shape the development of a composition.
In ED, we have noted that emergent structures need a strong point of origin. Beginnings are key and time is taken to develop and strengthen their definition and clarity. Many structures begin with the spontaneous construction of a movement phrase. It is important to note that in an improvisational dance context, a movement phrase is possible to repeat without the expectation of exactness that choreography may demand. Within EI, the accuracy or variability of phrase material is left up to the improviser. However, the performer is continually challenged to make a coherent structure visible to an outside viewer, an intention that makes the experience of each structure distinct and engaging.
We have identified four recurring structures as particularly useful for the solo practice, which can also apply to the ensemble practice. There are many more to be discovered.
Theme and Variations: This structure is the most enduring compositional form found throughout dance history and is a fundamental design found in nature. Look at any species of plant or animal and find endless variation. In EI, a theme is any coherent focus on phrasing, texture, timing, etc. that can be repeated clearly. Variations can be as classical as rondos or ABA, or as abstract as three linear gestures that repeat continuously, varying in timing and spatial pattern.
Accumulation: This structure is well known in post-mother dance through the choreography of Trisha Brown. A dancer creates a phrase by sequentially adding one movement at a time to an initial gesture, repeating from the beginning of the phrase after each addition.
Initial Conditions: In scientific theories of chaos and complex systems, initial conditions are found to be extremely important in how structures develop from their origins. In movement improvisations, a beginning or origin can be any set of movements composed into a phrase. Once the phrase can be repeated, the improviser focuses on a particular aspect of the phraseL a gesture, a set of movements, a rhythm, or a texture found in the original improvised material emanates from that choice, creating new material.
Excavation: Similar to Initial Conditions, this structure begins with a phrase of movement developed by the improviser. Once the phrase can be repeated, attention is directed internally, activating an exploration of subtext or emotional response to what is hidden under the surface of the phrase. Finding an internal sourcing taps into a non-linear developmental arc and improvisation. Excavations can lead to unexpected, unpredictable movement patterns.