In today's session we talked about the progress we had made so far with our project in order to receive some feedback and thoughts from Noyale and from the group.
Our project has now moved on from being such a broad topic as memory and is now focusing on memory within improvisation which although is still a broad topic, it feels as if we are becoming more specific about what we are researching as the project moves forward. This was evident to the group through our discussion with them.
We had some good feedback from Noyale which we can work on and incorporate into a further practical session which will take place on Tuesday (20th). After seeing how we looked at how dancers took on other dancers movement in our previous practical she suggested using the following activity to look at this further and test the dominance within a group.
-We choose a rhythm that everyone creates a movement or short phrase to by use of improvisation that they can repeat over and over again for a period of ten minutes. Eventually everyone will begin moving the same. The aim of this activity is to show who within the group has the dominance.
We also will incorporate looking at how rhythm affects improvisation and memory, somehow incorporating this into the practical. This is something that will be discussed on Monday.
In addition to this we plan to look into the relationship between collective and personal memory and how this affects improvisation in a group setting (i.e whether an individual will remember more personal experiences or whether external influences will affect their memory of what has happened).
-Collective memory refers to the shared pool of information held in the memories of two or more members of a group.
-personal memory - memory for episodes in your own life
This idea is really interesting, I remember this happening to Forefront dancers when working on Divya Kastiri's piece, we were meant to stay four beats apart in canon but because the phrase was repeated so many times we almost always ended up in unison. Rhythm and pattern unites the physical world, heart beats, breath, walking patterns, natural rhythms are intrinsic to human functioning and perception of life around. Our auditory and nervous system has a special link in this way, hearing rhythmic beats triggers muscle memory and causes an adrenaline release which prepares the body for action.
ReplyDeleteCultural music memory works for this type of exploration too; through working with dementia sufferers who have lost their working memory music has been proven to recall movements and footwork which are exact and stylized for each type musical rhythm played. This is a very interesting and current topic for research. For more info: http://www.communitydance.org.uk/dance-health-and-wellbeing/dementia.html
Just thinking about rhythm - and you may have already considered this - experimenting with using ones body to create sound patterns will have a different quality (regarding aesthetics and dominance) to creating a rhythm within ones body/using movement to portray timing.... Just thinking... because our year work together as a group to find our own timing (as a collective) it might be an interesting experiment to try with year one and compare and analyse results.
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