ASOU progress notes #1

Workshop One:

Automatism and the Unconscious Mind 

    (pre-improvisation)

Improvisation score: Anatomical beginnings

• Are you walking differently because you’re in a dance studio?
• Feel the heels digging holes in the floor
• Webbed toes 

• Loosen the neck 
• Tailbone is heavy 
• Look where you want to go, then go there 
• Your knees are swords and you are in a battle 
• Collarbones as a cave, there are people residing in the crevice of your collarbones 
• Bellybutton is an elevator button that keeps getting pressed and pressed and pressed 
• Back of the skull falls out 
• Let everything fall 
• repetitions of some things 

Improvisation score; inspired by Jo Lloyd

• Dance your expectations 
• You before you had any training 
• Spontaneous group phrase 
• Comfortable 
• Your back is performing
• Discomfort
• Dodge 
• The nothing dance 
• Think, don’t do it, do it 
• Gesture 
• Trust yourself 
• Vessel with no front 
• You are representative 
• Never arriving 
• Grid system
• Everything is a transition
• Copy someone else 
• Playing a board game with your toes 
• Protest!!!
• The everything dance 
• No twice 
• Turning 
• Lines of energy 
• Don’t step where you’re going to step 
• Balance 
• Do the unshowable
• Don’t understand what you’re doing 
• You have rude elbows
• Bird is trapped inside your rib cage 
• Your body is emotional 
• Pay attention to what you pay attention to 
• Have a conversation with two body parts 
• Out to the sides
• One person in / another / a third / another etc.
• Pagan dance ritual 
• A spell for someone 
• Tap dance 
• I want to touch you but you don’t want to touch me 
• Fulfil your own desire for someone else
• Once you name it, move on
• Spine always moving

Dada random generation poetry:

    (dada random generation poetry)

Workshop Two:
Chance and Live Collage

Exquisite Corpse: 

Drawing task - character creation 

Writing task - secret agent conversation

Exquisite Corpse choreography / movement making - in pairs, split body into two halves

  (mid-Exquisite Corpse task)

Live Collage, employing chance

1) Movement from Exquisite Corpse task solo + track + costume

Discussion

2) Conversation from Exquisite Corpse task in pairs + track + object

Discuss

Workshop Three:

Dreamscapes

1. Dada random generation poetry and sharing 

2. Dream recollection meditation + reflection: senses, scenario, relationships

3. Tarot cards advice

4. Creation station - scene about this dream / focus on specific senses, images, feelings

5. Discussion

Workshop Four:

The Happening

Allan Kaprow - an American painter and a pioneer in performance art / he helped develop 'The Environment' and 'The Happening' In the 50’s and 60’s / Happenings were spontaneous, non-linear action which revolutionized the practice of Performance Art - things that are well-spread through contemporary dance practice these days but was revolutionary at the time. 

THE HAPPENING 

Spontaneous live creation/collage combining our elements of improvisation, exquisite corpse conversation, dream scene.

There are no rules: you can pause/hold a position, leave the space, interrupt the action, use objects around the space.

We will use the lights to enhance the mood.