Improvisation: walk, spin, balance, fall and get up - 23/02/2015

We started this lesson by doing improvisation exercise which included walking, spinning, falling and getting up. 

1) First we just walked around the room. Then teacher told us to imagine different kind of situation and change our walking style to that image. We had to imagine for example rush hour on a street, crowded shopping center, tightrope walking or walking inside of a train.

2) The second part of the exercise was that we had to spin in a different kind of way. For example we had to imitate a tornado and airplane and how these things would go around. 

3) In the third part of the exercise we had to do different kind balanced positions. From the balanced position we had to fall down in different kind of ways and then get up and do it again in a different way. You could have images in this exercise also for example being on a slippery ice.

For me as a physical education teacher to be I think this is a really good exercise to execute in a gym class because it´s easy enough for every student because everybody can walk and run, spin, fall and get up. The images are good way to make the practice more interesting. Students get to do the movements they want to but still there are some guidelines. It is also really important that there aren´t wrong ways of doing this exercise and students should know that. I think that in improvisation there is no such a thing as doing wrong kind of movement and I think that makes it easier for students to participate.   

After this warm up exercise we had to create choreography, which had to include movements of walking, turning or spinning, balance, falling and getting up. It was nice that we continued with the same topic that we had in the first practice because now you got already some ideas for the choreograph. This is really good exercise for the students also because you can really easily create your own choreograph after you have already done practice with same movements. It would be nice to add everybody´s or couple student´s choreographs together and by that get longer choreographs that students can performe to each others.

In small groups we continued the exercise by showing our dance choreographs to the others three r four times as long as the music was going. Then the teacher told us a new way of doing our choreographies. For example we had to imagine that we are in a jungle or walking in a mud and we had to use different kind of dynamics and speed. Then we presented the choreography again. Other students did not know what the new way of doing the choreography was so they had to guess what was the image that we had. This exercise really challenged me to focus on the little details and differences that I had to do in the choreograph. It was also interesting to try to find the diffrences in other students choreographs and what was the image that they had. I think this kind of exercise would be really good for dancing classes and also for drama classes in school.