Choreographic Lab

TRACE: Improvisation in a Box

This creative collection points towards the sensuous and playful nature of improvising - uncovering the experiential and ontological features of solo dance improvisation and focusing on notions of memory, (dis)appearance, nomadism and pleasure.

TRACE documents the underlying concepts of improvisation through a series of correspondence between a dancer and her practice, alongside training tasks and scores for improvisation.

The box contents combine creative acts and poetic writing to enter the discourses of improvisation and documentation. Further, articulating and instructing, the reader is encouraged to take up the act of dancing, for it is only through the doing that an embodied understanding emerges.

• Of interest to students, teachers and professional practitioners in the performing arts

• Creative inspiration and training materials

• Insightful and poetic articulation of dance improvisation practices

Conceived, written and performed by Vida L Midgelow
Video by Tim Halliday, Dissolve Ltd.
Print materials designed by Artfully Bound / Khyati Koria-Green

For more information / to order contact: Artfullybound@thebeetroottree.com

Voice: a re-tracing is a video/sonic work brings together and develops a series of danced scores (filmed and edited by Tim Halliday as part of ‘Trace: Playing with/out memory’) and a new sonic score created by Tom Williams - ‘Voice’ – (which in itself is already a development of the sound created for ‘Playing’ from recordings of Vida’s voice). This new work seeks to bring improvisation to the screen whilst revealing the nature of the improvisation tasks being explored/experienced.

A task: Write a letter to your ‘practice’ as if it were your lover.
by Robert Daniels, offered to participants at Tea and cakes with the Lab
- I thank Robert for the journey this task initiated.

If you were to write a letter to your practice as if it were your lover, what would it say? What sentiments, concepts or emotion’s would it reveal? And, if you’re practice were to speak back to you what might it say?
You might try it – I can recommend it - this taking up of the act of writing dancing.

This mode of writing is also connected to the process of ‘intertextual resonances’ as a feedback system. Here the feedback is intra-subjective rather than from external voices.

Score: a ‘notation’ (graphic, poetic or descriptive etc.) that can be ‘read’ or interpreted. As impulses and/or structural guidelines for performance they enable open and spontaneous responses.

A task: Coming in and out of improvisations make a note of images, sensations and actions that occur to you whilst dancing. From these notes formulate a short phrase or instruction that becomes, in turn, the starting point for your next improvisation. Repeat several times until you find words that seem to embody your experiences, providing you with impulses to move.

Through poetic phrases scores were created for ‘TRACE’ – these embody something of the central features of improvisation - mapping out the territory of playing with/out memory. Emerging out of the practice of improvising they are poetic images formulated as scores, that in the form of a feedback loop, become starting points for improvisation. The scores are free floating in that they exist as concepts with guidelines or suggested arenas for further exploration, from which to work.

Like memorabilia the scores resonate with memories and places/times visited – inviting you to revisit. But like all returns, the re-visiting can, should, never be the same, for the circumstances always change. These scores do not seek to provide a structured movement vocabulary, do not exist in any pre-set order, or predetermine any location for improvisation. Rather as a strategy for exploration these scores aim to provide an impulse that, when followed, open up and reveal the multifaceted nature of movement improvisation.

(A few) training tasks for improvisation

Below you will find a few improvisations tasks that I find useful when preparing to improvise.

The point of the story is to remember to play (Deborah Hay)

Invisible Dances
Stand or lay in the space. Begin to imagine yourself moving…
running down a hill
sitting on a train
climbing a tree
tumbling upside down
rolling through grass

Remain still …imagine,
gesturing, falling, rolling, curving…
A dance unfolding in your body/mind…

Note the changes in your body … in your attunement … in your readiness.

Noting and Following
Listening as the basis for moving.
Notice a sensation, let your attention be drawn freely, pay attention to the itches and glitches… these are points from which you can begin.
Follow an impulse to move…
Allow this to flow through you… to enter you.
Follow through with the rest of the body… supporting, expanding, exploring the emerging possibilities.

A pathway develops as you step out on the journey… take this path for as long as it interests you (and sometimes beyond)… give way to the bends and curves that occur on the journey… noting still other, alternative, sensations… these may suggest new directions.. new pathways.

Noting these you might, or might not, trace a new trajectory.

Listen, move, follow, explore.

(In)between
Play (in)between two extremes.
Dance the smallest dance… Dance the largest dance…
…the invisible/the visible… micro/macro…
stillness/action… up/down… floor/ceiling…
right/left… centre/margin… front/back…
loud/quiet… curved/angled… static/travelling

(De)composing
Starting with an improvised phrase… replay it… as close as you can…as many times as you need… begin to add to this phrase… a new gesture, a different pathway, a shifting quality… embellish and elaborate… unfolding the making of your dance.

As you work note and begin to focus upon fragments… play out the framents… allow one to become your focus… let this expand until it develops into a phrase…

Start the process again.