Once More with Feeling
The Deep Dive
Module 1: Impulse and Momentum
Impulse: impulse quantifies the overall effect of FORCE OVER TIME. Impulse is the driving or motivating force, a sudden or spontaneous inclination or incitement to some action.
This is equivalent to a change in momentum.
Impulse: urge, drive, compulsion, stimulus, incitement, motivation.
Momentum: Momentum is the measurement of MASS IN MOTION. How much mass, how much time…
Related to FORCE.
Momentum: energy, power, propulsion, thrust, drive, force, power, strength.
Week 1
Week 1 (04/26/23)
Slowing down and working to be aware of our IMPULSE when we move (change direction, add force) and stretching out the momentum a movement has. We’re doing this to try to s-l-o-w our brains down and become aware of changes in both impulse and momentum, and to begin to notice when we react to a movement impulse with a change in aspects like direction, momentum, speed, force etc.
Week 2
Week 2 (05/03/23)
We continue our work with impulse as we create movement sentences (or phrases) with one, two, three and four impulses.
Things you could think about and/or work on this week:
- play with Time as it applies to the impulse itself (the length of time the energy you’re using to create the impulse lasts). Is the energy you’re using to create your movement (this is what I’m calling it’s impulse) released quickly or slowly?
- play with different amounts of energy. Is the energy (the impulse) strong, is there lots of energy (it could be lots of strong energy, or a little strong energy), is it powerful? Or is the energy soft, weak, frail, just a touch (again, it could be lots of soft energy or just a little soft energy)?
- play with Time as it applies to the length of the momentum created by the impulse (the length of time. Does the amount of energy (or impulse) burn away quickly and you’re left with a short length of time the momentum lasts? Does the amount of energy slowly release and decrease so the impulse that created the movement creates momentum that lasts a long amount of time?
The Creative Movement class (Thursdays 6-7 pm ET - Live Stream and recorded access are included in your Dedicated Dancer subscription) is literally the perfect pairing for Once More with Feeling, and I’m tailoring that class to reflect ideas that will enrich your experience in Once More with Feeling. This week, we worked with impulse as it is classified in Laban’s theories on Effort. Specifically, we worked with the movement qualities of dab, flick and slash. In addition to the movement exercises, we had wonderful discussions that I thought you might enjoy, so I’ve included a direct link to the class recording here.
The first 7 minutes (the warm up and check in) have no audio right now, that was our warm up.
Week 3
Week 3 (05/10/23)
We continue our work with impulse and begin thinking and talking about texture.
A few things I wanted to clarify:
1) Benjamin Zander video.
Angela was asking about the connection between the Benjamin Zander video and our impulse sentences - she mentioned it seems like he was ‘taking the impulses away’ and we were adding impulses. While there are fewer impulses when Benjamin Zander plays the final version of the song, the impulses have been grouped together into a larger unit that has modulation and shape to it. It’s a longer and more complicated impulse single impulse made of many notes. Initially it was played so that each note was its own impulse…
If we think about the musical phrase as a sentence, I could respond to a question with the simple answer of ‘Yes’. Here, that’s one word, a single impulse.
I could also reply with ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Two parts, one sentence, one impulse. If I said "‘Yes. That’s right.’ we have two sentences and two impulses. It feels different… Even when you read it!
I could also reply with ‘Yes, that’s right, and that’s a wonderful example.’ Three parts, one sentence, one impulse. Again, if I separated each part of that single sentence into individual sentences it would feel different.
2) Impulse and Momentum.
Stacey mentioned she felt she was ‘rushing into the momentum’.
Momentum is a result of impulse - it exists because of impulse. Remember, impulse is the release of energy…
Homework
Listen to music this week and listen for how the individual notes are grouped together to form a phrase (Benjamin Zander’s single impulse).
If you watch the full video, he also mentions how we can follow ‘the long line from A (the start) to B (the end) of the piece he plays. So there are phrases that are played as single impulses, and the phrases within the piece are grouped together to form the whole piece! Cool eh?!
Week 4
Week 4 (05/24/23)
An in depth look at Timbre.
Timbre (pronounced TAM-ber) is the unique quality of sound that an instrument or voice has - the character, texture and colour of a sound. It is how one can tell the difference between a piano and a trumpet playing the same pitch, as well as one of the ways we can describe the difference between Bob Dylan’s voice (nasal and scratchy) and Cher’s voice (full and rich). Each instrument or voice has a different timbre, and the same instrument or voice can be played or used differently to create different timbres.
The timbre also includes the way the sound changes over time (the sound envelope or ADSR envelope which stands for Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release). For example, percussion instruments make most of their sound right at the start of a note, and then the sound quickly fades away. This is called attack and fade. Sustained instruments like a flute, horn, or violin start making a sound and keep making it, allowing them to create smoother, more fluid music. So the timbre of a percussive instrument is tends to be sharp and bright, as opposed to a violin which is often more soft and warm (depending, of course, on how it’s played!)
Timbre can also be called tone colour, tone quality or voice (regardless of whether or not the sound is from a person).
Timbre is a category for the features of sound that are not pitch, loudness, duration or spatial location.
Remember that describing timbre using emotional terms (excited, happy, sad etc) is a description of the interpretation or the effect of the sound, as opposed to describing the quality of the sound itself.
Timbre can be:
Bright/Dark
Brassy/Reedy
Shrill
Round
Piercing
Harsh
Noisy
Thin/Thick
Rich
Buzzy
Pure
Raspy
Mellow
Strained
Warm/Cold
Deep
Heavy/Light
Breathy
Vibrato
Silky
Clean/Distorted
Further notes:
When describing Timbre, notice the difference between using words that describe what you HEAR and words that describe how you FEEL about what you hear. Keep the description to what you hear.
Similarly, when deciding how to move with your descriptive words, I would suggest staying as close to your descriptive words as you can rather than drawing lines into associations, emotions or anything else.
So if you’re descriptive words for the timbre of the instrument is bright and piercing, directly translate that into movement (so to me that would be moving directly and precisely, possibly percussively so short and sharp). If the timbre is smokey and mellow, the movement would be indirect (so smooth arches and circles) with a small amount of energy.
Week 5 (05/31/23) How we can manipulate movement quality outside of size, speed/tempo, force/energy, timing.
1 Stance & Arm placement
2 Body weight & Feet
3 Body position & Facing
4 Space/3 Dimensionality - wringing and twisting
Week 5
Week 6
Week 6 (06/14/23) Impulse creation from music, and contrasting music
Week 7
Week 7 (06/21/23)
Working with Space and 3 Dimensionality
Through the exploration of three-dimensional space, we can manipulate not only our own bodies but also the environment around us, as we sculpt shapes and forms that encapsulate emotion and narrative. The intricate interweaving of levels, directions, and planes brings depth and texture to our work, unlocking a limitless realm of artistic expression.
Week 8
Week 8 (06/28/23) - Working with pitch, dynamics and force as a way into representing timbre.
Clarification and homework.
This week I tried a different approach to working with texture in your movements, or transferring the qualities of what we hear (the timbre of an instrument) .
I got you to warm up by using variations in the amount of energy or force as well as size. This was kind of a sneaky way to get you to work with varying the texture or dynamics or volume of your movements without using those terms (cause for some of you, that might cause stress or for you to move in a !)…
Then we focused on changing the dynamics or volume of a repeated movement or ‘thing’ - you used size, speed, tension, energy or force, height, what ‘attitude’ the move was given, how much of the rest of your body does the movement or ‘thing’ affect.
We matched the dynamics of the song in our movements, matched our movement to the shape of the sound, and followed pitch.
I talked about the horizontal and vertical aspects of music (that’s at 29:25) in order to start to place different instruments or sounds in the music into a relationship to one another, and how we can use this hierarchy or relationship to help to organize our movements and how that can create texture in your movement. I’ll be including this in upcoming classes, so don’t fret if it’s new or your not sure how it fits into what we were doing.
While this isn’t quite representing the timbre of the music in our movement, it’s getting close enough to probably have included aspects of timbre unintentionally! In order to be representing timbre (or only timbre), we would have to shape our movements to reflect the timbre (bright, sharp, smokey)… So why did we do this Audra and why did you say it was timbre? I wanted to cover some of the ways that we reflect the music in our movement - ways that are already in you, and that you do all the time, both consciously and unconsciously. We can then begin to make conscious and informed choices to build our abilities, and to start to be able to separate and control the aspects that influence our movement choices and the qualities we layer on top of our movement.
Remember, timbre is a category for the features of sound that are not pitch, loudness, duration or spatial location - so while these aspects of sound are sometimes helpful, we do need to also apply the words which describe the timbre itself… So what we need to do is ADD the qualities of the timbre of the music. I know, I keep saying the same thing, I want to make it as clear as I can lol.
My advice for continuing to work with these ideas:
Choose or follow a single line (that’s an instrument or voice or sound) in the music. Be clear on WHAT you’re trying to represent of that line. Are you reflecting the dynamics or loudness, the pitch, or the duration (and I would suggest doing each of those separately at first, then in a few weeks, once you’ve practiced a bunch, you can start to intentionally combine them)? In this exercise, don’t worry about also including timbre. It will probably come out, but don’t focus on trying to include it.
Work with JUST timbre.
a) Choose or follow a single line in the music, and see how many different ways you can represent it. So if the timbre is bright and shiny, how would an arm undulation be bright and shiny (you could also work with opposites, so how would the same movement be dark and mysterious… then do the opposite for bright and shiny!).
b) Move to a song and notice what you’re following, what movement or action you are doing, and adjust that to reflect the timbre of that instrument as. your moving. This is obviously more challenging, so it might be a while before you’re ready to tackle this option! But don’t worry, practice will make it come, eventually!
A note on Timbre: When we refer to timbre, we are referring to the qualities of a single voice or instrument (called a line or a single line in music). When instruments or voices are overlapping or happening at the same time, as they do in a song, the overlapping individual timbres create what is called texture in music. So a song doesn’t have a timbre, it has a texture.
What used to help me remember that is likening a song to a piece of fabric. Just like individual strands of material are woven together to create fabric, so are individual instruments or voices to create music. The texture of a song could be dense (with many instruments or voices that create layers that are complex and rich) or light (with few layers that are easy to pick apart, or maybe even only one layer).
Around 55 minutes in the video, I wasn’t quite as clear as I could have been about removing pitch from my play with timbre, and representing timbre even when the instrument isn’t playing in the music. I’m going to try to make a video with some better examples, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll try writing out a better explanation!
This work leans heavily on the brain, I know that. But everything does when you first learn it. Remember your first glute squeeze? Remember how hard you had to fight to get it to work when you were also trying to remember choreography? Same with this - eventually, with lots of practice, these ideas get internalized and you can listen and respond, knowing that what you do ‘intuitively’ as a response to what you hear is actually hours and hours and hours of work just like we are doing in class each week!
I firmly believe that this material can change your dance, your movement, and your ability to respond to music and express emotions. And I firmly believe that everyone can learn this, there’s no magic gene in people that make you able or unable to move and respond in this kind of a way. It’s just understanding and lots of practice!
<3
Audra
For clarification… Timbre isn’t dynamics, pitch or force/effort, but can be revealed as we represent those things.
Moving with timbre only - for more on this, please see class recording for Week 4
Week 9
Week 9 (07/12/23) Providing contrast
I’ve talked about using contrast previously, but I wanted to focus on exploring that this week. How do we work with contrast?
In my experience, the way to get perceivable results is to set parameters or to use concepts in order to frame WHAT we are using or WHERE we are focused to provide somewhere for contrast to be shown.
We worked with the following as ways to include contrast:
- Time
- Dynamics
- Size 1: Large and small
- Size 2: Whole body and smaller isolated parts of the body
- Tension and release
- Open and close
Of course, when you work with any one of the above concepts, inevitably you’d also be unconsciously working with other concepts.
Working with a single concept to frame how you apply contrast to your movements is the first stage.
To work in a more complex way, you could work to consciously have different parts of the body working simultaneously with expressing different aspects of the same concept. For example, if you were working with contrast in Time, your feet could move slowly, while the arms moved faster.
You could also begin to simultaneously express more than one concept in your movements. For example, you could work with contrast in Time and Dynamics simultaneously. Of course at first this requires a lot of thought and effort, but as always, with practice, you can begin to do so without much conscious thought.
Week 10
Week 10 (07/19/23)
Texture
Texture is how the tempo, melodic and harmonic materials are combined in a musical composition, determining the overall quality of the sound in a piece. The texture is often described in regard to the density (thickness) and range (width) between the lowest and highest pitches, as well as distinguished according to the number of voices, or parts and the relationship between these voices.
A piece’s texture may be changed by the number and character of the parts playing at once, the timbre of the instruments or voices playing these parts and the harmony, tempo and rhythms used.
Want to know more? Check this out: Learn about texture
As a way to try to understand some of the different ways that sound can be layered in music, there are a few things of recognized ways we can classify pieces of music (monophonic, polyphonic, homophonic and heterophonic). While the terms are helpful to know, the idea for us is more HOW these layers are structured and how that can change the texture of the song (the way that different strands can be woven into different kinds of fabric). Here’s a link to the webpage if you want to know more: 4 kinds of texture
(07/26/23)
Week 11
A week to work with ideas and prompts.
Your homework is to start to build a list of things you like to do or things that come ‘intuitively’ (really that means you’ve worked that idea so much that you don’t have to think consciously to implement the idea). Try to have at least three items on your list for the August 9th class.
You could think about movements you like, qualities, what you tend to gravitate to when you listen to music, how your movement usually is attached to music.
If you’re having a hard time coming up with things to include in your list, try thinking about what you DON’T like to do or what you find difficult, and see if there’s an opposite that you do like :)
Week 12
Week 12 (08/09/23)
Mindsets to effortlessly being present in your movement
This week’s approach set you up with 4 different mindsets for you to use. We used something from our newly generated list of ‘things you like to do’ or ‘things that come intuitively to you’. You could go through all 4 mindsets with the same item from your list, or use different items for each mindset, or choose more than one mindset or item from your list to work in one experiment.
This is basically a different approach to some of the concepts we’ve already worked with. Some people find applying ideas like Time and Space to be rather abstract, and sometimes you can begin to have a routine approach once you’ve become comfortable with applying or working with things like Time and Space.
1. Introducing yourself to your movement.
How would you move if you were just returning to movement/dance after a long time away? How would you move with an item from your list if you were experiencing the ability to move that body part for the first time? What if you were an alien in your own body?
You can also incorporate gaze and touch, as well as the feeling of your clothes on your skin as you move.
Feel the tension and release, the pull through space, the unfurling, the extension and contraction as you move.
2. Introduce yourself to an outside observer.
How might you introduce your movement to someone outside yourself? To someone who has never seen movement like this? How might you introduce the body part or the movement so someone could have an understanding of how the movement is happening?
What if there were more than one observer, in various places in your space and at different levels? How would introducing your movement to an observer who was very close to you differ from one who was very far from you?
How about if the gaze of the observer was neutral as opposed to interested? What if they were indifferent?
3. Use interruption.
What if you stopped or interrupted your movement or action part way through? What position do you end up in? Where could you go from there? What if you reversed the pathway just a little bit after your interruption, before reversing again and continuing?
Where is the rest of your body when you interrupt your movement? What if you held your body back as you continued after the interruption? What if your body moved there first, then your movement started - so the movement ‘caught you up to’ your new body position?
4. Use Load and Anticipation.
Stay physically still as you imagine your body doing your movement or action. Without any outward activity, feel where your energy is going, feel how you could control and change where you send that energy before you move. You could potentially change everything about your movement with this idea!
Your anticipation or loading of your body could shift your weight, change posture, change the level or facing of your body or parts of your body, alter where the initiating part of your body sits in space and thus change the trajectory of your movement or action.
Your homework is to continue to grow and refine your list of things you like to do or things that come ‘intuitively’. If you like figure 8’s, how do you like to do them? Is there a stronger side that you like to start on? What direction? Do you like to do them at a speed that seems slow, medium or fast to you? Have you noticed how you like to attach them to music, or how you like to move with the music with them? How do you start them? How do you end them? Are there things that you like to do with your hands or arms that accompany your figure 8’s?
Week 13 (09/13/23) - Load and Layers Part 1
Week 13
Week 14
Week 14 (09/20/23) - Load and Layers (Part 2)
Load:
a weight or source of pressure borne by someone or something
the amount of power supplied by a source
put a large amount of something on or in (a vehicle, ship, container or body part)
anything put in or on something for conveyance or transportation
Unload:
to take a load from, remove cargo or freight from
to remove or discharge
Dump, get rid of, unpack, disburden, lighten, relieve, rid, slough, discharge, unburden, void, release
Supplemental load video:
Creative Movement class from this week
We played with vertical and horizontal ‘scales’ where we used the body as an instrument Heavy (Low pitch) and Light (High pitch) along a vertical ‘scale’, then flipped it so the scale was horizontal.
I also talked a little about how you could think of Heavy as think and thus up could be Heavy…
All of this works with thinking about Loading the body with Heavy and Light, Thick and Thin, and High and Low Pitches.
Creative Movement (09/22/23)
“Weight is a particularly interesting aspect of Laban’s theories because of its relation with gravity. It is interesting to note that the way people move naturally in relation to weight is not necessarily dependent on their mass. For example, a skinny person may stomp around or vise versa. In Laban for All, weight is said to be ‘the force exerted on a body by a gravitational field’ and that ‘our ability to stand upright depends on the tension between the force of the body and the pull of gravity’ (Newlove, Dalby, 2004: 119) so it seems that some people will ‘indulge’ in gravity whilst some will ‘resist’ (Newlove, Dalby, 2004: 119).”
from Savannah Indigo
With this in mind, the term Heavy equates a feeling of ‘giving in’ to gravity or feeling the pull of gravity, and Light refers to ‘breaking free’ of the ‘weight’ of gravity, whereas we most often think of weight as body weight (my body weighs “X” lbs). This idea of weight (or mass) can sometimes become confusing if we are trying to work with applying heavy weight to a limb that is at a high level in space, or when thinking about Loading with a light weight along a horizontal plane. As a result, the two polarities in Weight are often called Light and Strong, as opposed to Heavy and Light.
Week 15 (09/27/23) Layering from Load
Week 15
Week 16 (10/04/23) Load Part 4
Week 16
10/11/23
Direction Part 1
Week 17
We worked for a while with the 6 ‘Pure’ Directions (Up and Down, Right and Left, Front and Back). Then I added the option of moving in 2 pure directions at the same time, but NOT combining them.
We found two different modes of thinking about orientation using Body or Room Keys.
BODY Key is based on the orientation of the BODY (the front direction is where ever the the front of your body faces regardless of where the front is in the room).
ROOM Key is based on the directions in the room regardless of where your body is facing.
10/18/23
Direction Part 2 - The Cube, Counterbalance and Contrast
Week 18
Week 19 10/25/23
Counterbalance in warm up, Separating Load and Impulse, or Primary and Secondary Loads
Looks like this is Week 19 despite me saying it’s Week 17 in the video!
Week 19
We worked with a weight shift (primary load), stayed there and added an impulse (or secondary load).
Take it SLOWLY and really begin to feel the sequence and the two parts.
Unload or return to neutral - empty yourself.
11/01/23 Counterbalance warm up, main load and sequentially adding secondary load
Week 20
Week 21 (11/08/23) A new way to think about primary and secondary loads - using weight shift/levels, arms, chest and hips as explorers (load acceptors) both on their own and with the addition of a secondary selection.
Week 21
12/05/23 - Review 1
Week 22
In this review session, we worked with Time as well as with Time and Load. I mentioned you could play with the amount of time the load took or to work with the two concepts separately.
We also worked with Introducing yourself to your movement, which could include touch (or tracing).
The final concept with played with was Momentum (you could have also included Impulse, though I wanted mostly to focus on the continuation aspect of that pairing).
12/13/23 - Review 2
Week 23
In our second review session, we worked with adding a second concept to our original parameter for play. This can be helpful in a few ways. The first being that it allows us to add onto our original concept instead of switching our mindset, which can be useful if we are feeling productive or if we are looking to create movement that has a theme or is rooted in a single idea.
If we are working to generate movement for an improvisation or for choreography, this can help us to create movement that has unity or commonality, which is an important and fundamental aspect of successful dance work.
—————-
We first played with Impulse and Momentum, then added interruption (with the possibility of stopping or pausing), and the possibility of changing size, direction or the amount of force when our next impulse started.
After making a movement sequence, I asked to you find its ESSENCE.
Essence is defined as the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract, that determines its character.
Though we don’t often talk or think about this quality, at times, I have found it very helpful to be able to get at the essence of my movements as it provides me with both an anchor point in my work (as someone who often improvises, it’s very common for me to forget what I had planned to do or to work with) as well as a concrete way to both transfer action to other body parts or to abstract movement.
Then playing a variety of different kinds of music, I asked you to hold onto that essence as you went through your movement sequence. This is helpful as it can be used to provide contrast to our work, and is often the opposite to the way we tend to morph and change our movements in order to suit the timbre and/or sounds of the music we listen to.
—————
Next we switched to listening to the music’s timbre and reflecting that in our movement (which I called the texture of our movement).
After that, I asked you to play with Time (slowing down and speeding up your movement choices), in order to create variations and textures within our textures… ooooooh!
Next Steps - Class 1
Next Steps - Class 2
