Being in a contact - 27/02/2015

At first in this class we did improvisation by yourself. First we started to move having our feet on the ground. The idea was to have feet on the ground and make movement towards the ground, no movement at all, go around and stretch to different directions. Next part was to try the same thing but have your back against the floor. It was actually lot more difficult to move while having your back on the floor at the same time because back of you body is really big area. Trying to move yourself while keeping the back against the floor it made the options of the movements narrower. We also tried to make movement where some body part touches the floor, it did´t matter what body part it was but some body part had to always touch the floor.

Then we tried this exercise with a partner or in a group of three. First the contact area was hands and after that we tried to move back against back. Partners should end up having a flow in the movement when they both are following other´s movement. Partner´s movement was easier to follow when back was against back because the contact area was bigger. But on the other hand big contact area narrows the possibilities of movement and also it is harder to feel the smaller movement of the partner.

The next practice was about moving you´re pair with words while the partner that is moving is having her eyes closed. Sometimes I was doubting my partner´s instructions because I felt like I was really close the wall and that is why I got suspicious. You really had to trust on the pair because other wise this practice would have not worked. When I started to move my partner only with the words I felt that I had a really big responsibility of my partner. It was hard to describe the movement that I wanted that my partner does because you can understand the description in so many ways. For example spinning on the floor can mean rolling on the floor or going around the spot where you are. And sometimes it was to think about what will I want that my partner does. 

In the next part we still continued working with pairs. The other one of the couple had her eyes closed and the other one was leading the way by having her hand on the neck. In this practise it was really hard to give that kind of signals of how you wanted you´re partner to move. But it was even harder to be the one eyes closed because you really did´t understand the signals what the other one was going to tell you. The hardest thing for showing was to go down and come up.

In the end we had this really nice exercise where one person stays up and others are laying on the floor really close to each other. That one person goes on top of us and the people on the floor started to turn so then the one on the top was moving across everybody. This would be a really god ice breaker for school gym classes but the students have to know each other quite well before doing this.