Improvisation with a pair: verbal and nonverbal communication - 24/02/2015

This class was about improvisation with a pair. First idea was to move with the pair and have different body parts touching the pair at all times for example hip or hand. Then we got to decide which bodypart is touching and which bodypart is leading the way. Contact improvisation is really new thing for me because I haven`t really done it before. Also being in a contact with someone is hard for me because I have my own personal space. Letting somebody to enter my personal space is  strange but at the same time I´m learning to loose it up and letting people come closer to me. With contact improvisation you get to know the persons way better and you get a deeper connection with them because you really need to trust on them when you work together. 

Facial expressions
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In this practice where we communicated with sound and movement 

and also only with movement I realized that verbal communication is so much more effective because you can use both your voice and face expressions to make it clear what do you want to tell to the other person. But in the end I think that people believe more in nonverbal communication. If person`s expressions and verbal messages are in conflict, people often believe more in the body language and expressions because body language rarely lies.  

Last excercise was to feel and then improvise to your partner´s feelings and emotions. The idea was to be influenced by the partners feelings and do movement that reflects the partners emotions. The idea was not to copy all the movements that your partner is doing. For me it was really hard to read and understand the feelings and emotions that my partner had. We actually had a group of three and that made the exercise even more challenging. Many times I started to do my own thing and move as I felt even though the idea was to move to the other one´s feelings.

This class actually reminded me of being an exchange student in Portugal. My Portuguese is really poor even though I can understand something. My communication and understanding in the class is mostly based on the people´s expressions and body language when teaching is happening Portuguese. It was interesting to realize that even though I don´t understand what the teacher is saying or the instructions she was giving I could still understand the main idea of the exercise just by following, following the expressions and doing the same as the teacher or the other students were doing. 

In the end we also had this practice where we made a triangle. This triangle form was supposed to stay thru the whole exercise even though it turned during the exercise. The person that is on the tip of triangle starts the movement and other ones are imitating the movement. Everybody will be the leader.