We went over A LOT of material this week, and any of it could be worked for hours on its own.

I started us off by giving you prompts to base your moments on, and encouraged you to work quickly, creating many different moments as opposed to spending time carefully sculpting.
WHY? I wanted you to work quickly in order to try to get you out of feeling things you make are precious, and to get you into a movement ‘sketch’ or movement ‘gesture’ mode. A sketch or a gesture drawing are two things visual artists (of all mediums) use to get their ideas out WITHOUT SPENDING TIME ON SPECIFICS. To work on the composition, to see how different compositions look, and to figure out what they eventually might want to develop by spending more time on it. Be an artist.

I talked about CONTRAST - pulling apart the pre-existing polarity within your moment. So if you’re moment had elements of soft and loud, making each of those even more. If you moment had fast and slow, increasing each end of that.
WHY? We tend to work and create work that is in the middle - medium tempo, medium amount of energy, medium weight… So increasing the distance from one polarity to its opposite tends to be more able to get our point, our emotions and our story across to our audience.

We watched Angela, Victoria and Miriam share the side to side moments they created, and I asked a bunch of questions, ‘what if’…
WHY? By asking ‘what if’, we are encouraging new ways of thinking, of moving and of creating. We are challenging our ‘go to’ ideas. We are being CREATIVE in the true sense of the word. Keep curious, keep asking ‘what if’…

I got you to create moments based on descriptions I gave you of a single line/instrument in several songs.
WHY? In order for you to start to understand how your movement and music can work, we have to begin with isolating aspects of the music and pairing our movement creations with that. It’s difficult (or perhaps even impossible) to understand and to create to the song as a whole if we cannot understand and/or explain how our movement works with single musical ideas.

Here’s a guide and an elaboration on the musically inspired moments (the last part of the class).
1. Our prompt
I isolated a single line or instrument, and described what was happening - so we did descending, and then we did ascending, descending.

2. The main action - our moment
Armed with our word or description of the musical line, we created our moment. I encourage you to do some movement sketches before settling on the contents of your moment. Then, as we have been doing over the past weeks, keep asking ‘what if’, engage the whole body (even if parts of the body are still), bring in dynamics, richness and detail.

3. Creating variations

a) Simplify - create a simpler version of your main action
b) Isolated/Full body - create a variation that is the opposite of what your main action is, either an isolation or a full body expression.
c) Traveling/Stationary - create a variation that either travels or is stationary. If you are creating a traveling variation, your traveling should reflect the structure of your main action.
We worked with creating a traveling version of our ascending, descending moment. That moment has two parts so your traveling should also have two parts, two sections, and most of you creating a descending that reversed the pathway of your ascending, so your traveling should reflect that.
While it’s not an error to go outside those two ideas with your traveling, you should recognize that if were to create one single traveling pathway, that creates a different visual that your ascending, descending did - so essentially, you’re creating for another musical idea.
d) Adding the dynamics and breath from the musical line. The musical line contains it’s own dynamics and its own sound characteristics that I wanted you to reflect in your moment (this is called timbre, and that my friends is a whole wonderful deep dive of its own).

I also asked you to play with Time, and this I think might have been a misleading way for me to label what I was after.
We had an ascending, descending moment, and while all our variations look different, they still follow the timing of the music. So when I said play with Time, what I was intending was that you either use half your moment over one full cycle of the musical moment, or stretched your moment over 2 musical moments. So start to layer your moment using different timings that the music suggested.

4. The Practice
Once we had done all this, I asked you to move to the music, and use the original and the 4 variations, plus pausing and Time play to follow that single musical line in the song.
WHY? Oh, so many reasons…
First of all, so you could start to work with one moment and its repetition with variations. It’s difficult to flip from one to the other and be both fully aware of what you’re doing (being able to notice and name what variation it is for example), and fully embodied.

Also, it’s not easy to follow just one line, so it’s an exercise in being precise about our listening and what we are responding to in the music. And an exercise in letting things in the music go by. An exercise in simplicity. An exercise in letting go. An exercise in doing less, with more intention.





Your homework this week is to work on any one of the things we did this week.
Here’s the playlist we worked with, and the songs with the musical prompts.
1. Tadow by Masego, FKJ - Descending following the rhythm guitar 1-2, 3, 4, 5 (we did this in class).
2. To the Last by James Blake - Side to side following the bass 1, 2, 3 (because it’s such a small pitch change, I would suggest either using the same body part and moving side to side in some way, or body parts that are close together).
3. A Comma by serpentwithfeet - Ascending, descending following the arpeggio (this has a wide pitch range - the notes go from low to high unlike what we followed in To the Last - so I might work with body parts that are further apart or work with a single body part and work with covering a larger vertical distance).
4. It’s like Love by Coubo - listen for the tension and the sound of push and pull.

Or use your own music! I would suggest NOT following the melodic line for now as an exercise in deep and active listening. If you’re feeling stuck or frustrated by picking out a single line of the music, I’ve also included some tracks with solo instruments on the playlist below.