Week #8

Arcie’s movement game of tag again reminded me that movement isn’t about necessarily about the correct technique or anything, it’s about improvising and doing what feels best. I’ve always thought of tag as a game where we just chase each other, but Arcie was able to break down the walls of us having to do that. I saw people hopping on one foot, crawling on the ground and just pretty much anything that came to mind. When people were tagged, there didn’t seem to be any thought of what they were going to do. They just did what felt natural to them and it worked. Arcie’s game really allowed to me see that sometimes we think too much about our actions. The best times may actually be when we have to randomly create something on the spot without thinking about it because we don’t stop ourselves from doing anything that we wouldn’t think is normal. I don’t think I would go crawl to play tag, especially at this age. When I was a kid, I may have done that because I didn’t really care, but now it seems I am too concerned about what I would look like if people saw me doing that in a public setting. Along with the movement sessions, we also went to see a dance performance. I was extremely impressed with all the dancers there used the space. They were rolling down hills and using trees. We tend to forget that the space around us can also be used in our movements because we just think movement has to do with ourselves.

Week #7

Fun and games was the message that I got from Brian’s movement. He was able to incorporate so many different ideas into his dance. I used to think movement as what I was doing, but in actuality, it also is about how you move with other people. Brian’s activity showed me that moving by yourself is one thing, but moving and coordinating with the people around you really makes movement exciting. Like in previous classes when we partnered up with someone and did those activities where we played off each other’s energy, that’s something that we can’t do individually and we often forget that. Pushing off someone else and then also following their actions creates a very interesting energy and can’t really be explained in words. There’s just something about movement with another person that makes it completely different from anything else. When we do create shapes by playing off one another, we seemingly copy each other’s movement without even doing it on purpose. The other performance with the cha-cha-cha dance also brings a different light on movement with others. Instead of copying what the other person is doing, we actually plan movements so that complement the other person’s movements. I find it very interesting that the male and female have different movements, but they all have meaning. It isn’t like they’re just moving in random places, they’re moving with each other, but also against each other in a way.

Week #6

The sessions by Troy, Lisa, Justin and Victor gave me another outlook on movement and dance. First off, Troy and Lisa came up with something very creative and opened up my eyes. We normally think that our body parts only have one purpose each. For example our feet are for walking and so forth. However, when they brought up the point that we could use our elbows to smell, it made me realize that our imagination can really bring another dimension to our everyday lives. So often we use our brains as judgement, but we fail to realize that our other body parts are also connected to us and they are all very important. When they told us to start doing odd movements such as smelling with our feet, I initially thought it was the most bizarre thing ever because we never use our feet in that way. However, it all started to make sense once we did the movements and it allowed me to think from another perspective. The underlying message is that if we just go with whatever feels natural instead of what we perceive as normal, we’ll be able to go far with our creativity. Justin and Victor also had some great ideas with their dances. They both connected their favorite sports to dance and movement and showed that there isn’t too much different about swimming, Frisbee and dance. I noticed that some of the technique is even the same. If I had a chance to teach another movement, I may have chosen to do one about basketball because as I was following their moves, as well as some of the warm ups we’ve been doing, I realized that shuffling my feet is exactly the same as doing defensive slides in basketball. Movement is such a versatile activity and can represent so many other things that we do in our lives.

Week #5

When I taught my group’s “Life Of An Economics” dance, I was feeling all sorts of emotions. I was nervous and excited all at the same time because I felt our dance was creative, but I didn’t know if people would truly get what we were trying to do. As we started performing the dance, everything just came together naturally and I found a connection with not only the rest of the class, but also with my group members. We were all saying things we normally wouldn’t say in front of a large amount of people and most of it was due to the fact that we weren’t expressing our emotions with what we perceived to be right or wrong, we were just going with the flow and letting our bodies tell the entire story. It was almost like our moves allowed us to be in our true element because there’s no such thing as a wrong dance move. Every move that we did said something and allowed us to show the class what it was like to be an Econ student. We could have easily just explained the entire dance with no movements, but the effectiveness came from the movements that we created to coincide with the story. When we were creating the dance initially, we didn’t know what we wanted the theme of the dance was going to be about and it actually took us a while to figure everything out because we wanted it to be perfect. We soon realized that it was impossible to come up with something that was perfect because every idea that we thought of had some flaw to it, or so we thought. At first when we brought up possibly creating a dance related to Street Fighter, all of us turned down that idea very quickly because we thought it would be dumb. We then thought about possibly doing a dance related to Economics and again we passed on the idea because it felt too boring. So when I thought about possibly creating a dance that fused the two ideas, there was a lot of hesitation and reluctance because again, we felt it wouldn’t work. However, as we started coming up with different movements to describe each scenario, I then realized that movements were very powerful and could describe emotions that we can’t say with words. “Actions speak louder than words” is a phrase we’ve always heard and it definitely is something that witnessed while coming up the dance. All of the movements that we were creating were very natural for us because it described exactly what we were trying to say with our words. It was to the point where we didn’t mind that doing movements that we normally wouldn’t do in a school setting, such as going on our backs to emulate the movements of a clock. We ended up finishing the dance rather quickly and when we presented it, we were nervous but at the same time we were confident because we were the past the stage of being afraid of being embarrassed as we knew our movements were telling a story. Another performance that I was very impressed by was Alpha’s which incorporated her major (French). Her dance really brought back the kid in me because it was fun and showed me that it’s never too late to be having fun. The movements she was doing were essentially movements that we do on a regular basis when we’re cooking, but she added the enjoyment factor into it. Often when I am cooking now, I don’t have that excitement I had when I was participating in her dance. The idea of doing something just for fun has become so foreign to me even with cooking because there are so many responsibilities that go into it now. When I cook now, I have to make sure I don’t end up messing the food up or I’ll be wasting the ingredients. Alpha’s dance reminded me that there was another factor that goes into cooking, which is being creative and having fun! This pretty much sums up most of our lives now as we now worry about all the consequences

Week #4

As we began class teaching sessions, I was anxiously waiting to see what the first groups would come up for their dances. I had no expectations going into it because there weren’t a lot of directions on what we should be doing for our teaching sessions. It didn’t seem apparent to me until later on when I realized that this may have been done intentionally by Celeste because she didn’t want to influence us in any way when we were thinking of what we wanted to teach, she wanted our dances to reflect what we wish to explore. With no preconceived notions, we would be able to be in our own space and our own creativity. In the first week, we saw Jillian and Melissa with their math-oriented dance. Once they started teaching their dance, I thought it was the most brilliant idea ever because it incorporated something that they liked and managed to turn it into a movement that could be taught in class. It was so inspiring to see how they put everything together and the most impressive aspect of their dance was that they made it very organized. Each movement that they made had a purpose and had a message whether it was the slightest flinch or the most forceful kick. I picked up on a lot of tips for my teaching session from watching how easy and carelessly they were moving with no second thoughts about anything. They just went for it and taught the dance with no hesitation and eventually did an outstanding job. The way they structured the dance reminded me of my PE classes in elementary school when a group of kids would group together for a presentation and just come up with something that was not only creative, but it also was fun for everyone. It was energetic and the music definitely added something extra to the presentation. The following by Stephanie was also very cool, but from another perspective. Through her different movements, she was able to tell a story which I thought was very creative. No, she didn’t move as much as the previous group did, but each movement she made was very powerful and very detailed. When she was describing each element and moving at the time, I could actually envision these elements just from her words along with the movements. From these two performances and what I picked up from them, I’m able to now create my own movement for next week because they showed me that there are no boundaries when it comes to creativity, it’s just a matter of what I’m feeling inside and what truly inspires me.

Week #3

  For our third lecture, we were privileged to have Kathryn Ricketts as a guest speaker and she was able to share some of her interesting ideas with us. One of the activities she had us to do was for us to pick up a pencil and simply write about which was similar to the free-flow writing from our earlier classes. I’m starting to realize the power of free-flow writing, it allows me to essentially ramble on and talk about things without having to worry about being criticized for writing anything that isn’t deemed correct. I’m also starting to realize that type of writing isn’t as easy as I thought it was. At all points during writing, I am constantly reading over everything that I’ve written because I’ve been trained to do. Rereading everything I’ve written is something that is very natural to me because in other classes, proof reading is very important because it decreases the margin of error on our papers. In this case though, rereading causes more errors because we end up erasing everything that is natural about free-flow writing  Then she told us to create a movement or physical emblems using the pencil as something that would not be associated with its original use. I thought that was activity was very interesting because growing up, we’ve always associated certain items with specific activities, but for this activity we had to display the items in a completely different way. The activity was harder than it originally appeared because our brains have been trained a certain way and it was difficult to escape that, but when I did come up with a movement, it allowed me to see that I’ve been limiting by creativity due to associating pencils with only activities related to school.

Week #2

 The second lecture was a great experience for me because I was more comfortable with the people around me along with moving differently in general. Celeste seemed to incorporate all these different types of movement, but I noticed that a lot of it was very spontaneous and seemingly very natural. This made me realize that movement is very natural and it’s only becomes forced or unnatural when we over-think the actions. This drew a parallel to another point that was made about the writing that we’ve been taught to do in University versus the free-flowing writing that we’ve been doing in this class. When we write something non-stop without being concerned about the structure or the content of the writing, we tend to write a lot more. The problem is that we’ve been trained to write a specific way in University which is why we tend to critique our writing to the point where the writing is very technical and not natural at all. Finally, we continued with the same group activities that we did from the previous week and the familiarity of myself with some of the other people in the class made moving more relaxing because I recognized my partners, so I was able to do certain movements without feeling weird about it.