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