3.) Discovery: A Movement Study

In the third section of this module you will utilize movement and performance to broaden students’ understanding of our environment. Focusing on the seminal site-specific work of choreographers Eiko and Koma your students will address the following questions: How can movement and dance alter our awareness of the environment?  What are the possible effects of investigating the environment through movement and dance?
* Note to teacher: A ‘movement study’ is an investigation in movement (without speaking and without music).  It is a series of movements that are used to investigate a given topic and may include shapes or locomotor movements,such as: walking, sliding, crawling, running, rolling; stillness; gestures; moving on different levels, different tempos, falling, balancing, ranges in energy quality: flowing, staccato, vibrating, strong, light, etc.

Texts
Read Eiko and Koma (2000) “Movement as Installation: Eiko & Koma in Conversation with Matthew Yokobosky” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22.1 (2000) 26-35. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/paj/v022/22.1yamada.html
Read Otake, Eiko (2006) Feeling Wind, Feeling Gaze.  (included with permission from Eiko Otake)

Read McKibben, Bill (2007) Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Chapter: 1 ‘Make it Credible,’ and Chapter 5 ‘Make it Creative.’ (permission pending)

Skim Climate 101 - on line at: http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming-basics/climate_change_101 (openly available on-line)

View
Eiko and Koma (1995) River
http://eikoandkoma.org/index.php?p=ek&id=2517

Discussion Topics
A) Discuss ‘Movement as Installation’ and ‘Feeling Wind, Feeling Gaze.’ One of the most important points in Eiko and Koma’s work is their goal of fostering awareness in themselves and their audiences.  What are they drawing attention/awareness to? How do Eiko and Koma offer alternative ways of thinking about the connections between our bodies, our sense of ourselves, and our environments?

B) In class writing assignment (20 minutes): Write a paragraph describing a place you remember in detail.  Do not say what place it is – just define its characteristics, how it looks, smells, sounds, feels, and perhaps tastes. In groups of two or three, read one another’s writings. Come together as a class to discuss what new, surprising, or unusual descriptions you heard.

C) In River, what do Eiko and Koma draw your attention to? Why might they be choosing to do so? Do you consider their work to be political?  In what ways yes, or no?

 

Activity 1: Place Visit, Journal, and Improvisation

Read or hand out the following assignments to your students:

Return to your ‘visiting place’ (see section 1 activity 2).  Spend ten to fifteen minutes there.  Close your eyes and breathe.  Invite awareness, open your eyes and focus on the quality and details of the space.  Consider pathways, boundaries, shapes and other qualities. Notice what has changed since your last visit? Did you have an a priori expectation that your visiting place would have changed? Do expectations constrain our feeling and sensing of the pathways, shapes and qualities of our environment.

Journal 3
After you have completed this experiential process, describe your place in your journal.  Take in specifics of this environment.  Remember to allow time for direct engagement with place before writing and reflection.
Class Work: Improvisation
Ask students to bring their journal writing to class. Divide students into groups of 5 and ask them to share their writing with your group.  Each group should choose 3-5 elements (words, objects, images, pathways, qualities, etc. from the writings) to work with.  They may or may not choose an element from each person; it does not matter.  Just be sure to choose 3-5 elements that everyone in the group finds interesting.  (For instance, they might have words like rock, wind, light, dripping, lazy, flowing, straight, crackly, wet, bumpy, cold…)  This list of 3-5 elements are the group’s instructions for moving.  Ask each group to find a space that they can move in, without running into any other groups. ask them to take three minutes to improvise moving, using the list of 3-5 elements as their only instructions.  No talking or planning movement, only improvising on the spot.  All groups should do this at the same time.  Each group is doing its own ‘group improvisation.”  No audience.
Discussion Topics
What words were conducive to movement? Conversely, what words were difficult to embody? Why?  What was most interesting to do?  Why?

Have each group discuss and choose 3-5 new elements that are conducive to movement (they can repeat the words from the last list that worked well).  This new list of 3-5 elements are the group’s new instructions for improvising movement.  Take three minutes to improvise moving, using this new list of words as your instructions.  If you want to, groups may show their movement studies.  It is not necessary.

Activity 2: Place Visit, Journal, and Movement Study

Read or hand out the following assignment to your students:
Return to your ‘visiting place’ (see section one activity two).  Choose some aspects of your chosen place that you find interesting or important.  What aspects, or parts of your chosen place might go unnoticed by someone just passing by? You may focus on a small area within the space, or on a specific thing within the space (i.e, a tree, rock, the breeze, a shadow, color, texture, sound, etc). Notice the details and quality of this place.  Consider pathways, boundaries, shapes, and other qualities.  Notice the effects this place and the things in it have on you.  Breathe deeply and allow an exchange between the inner landscape of body and the outer landscape of place. Some of this assignment is intentionally a repetition of what you have done before. Notice any changes.

Journal 4
After you have completed this experiential process in your chosen place, write down whatever your awareness captured of this space this time. What has changed since your previous visit?  What remains the same?
            
Movement Study
In the space:
            Choose three to five elements or aspects of the space that interest you.
            Create a two-minute movement study that incorporates those three to five elements and draws attention to an aspect of your environment that might otherwise go unnoticed. You can use any motion and sound, but avoid pantomime and avoid using words. You might incorporate into your movement:
            Patterns in the space.
            Pathways.
            Shapes.
            Boundaries.
            Textures (How might these be translated into movement?)
            Sounds (existing or potential sounds that can happen in that place).
            Light (How might this be translated into movement?)
            Motion (wind, other….).
Consider which elements are most conducive to embodying in movement. It may take a few tries. Stillness can be used during some parts of this movement study.
            Once you have a two-minute movement study, practice it.  Repeat it until you can remember it well.  Specify its details.  Take it home and try it in another space (your room, the gym…).  You will probably have to change parts of it to adjust to the new location, but the movement should be done just as fully.  Bring it to class.
Class work: Performance
Show your studies to the class, three or four people at a time.  Follow each performance with the following question:
Discussion Topics:
From the performers perspectives-
What did you notice in the movement?
What kinds of things did you try to bring into movement? 
How did your movement study influence your attention to the environment?
What happened when you moved the movement study out of your ‘visiting place’? 
What elements translate clearly from place to body-in-motion? 
Which elements were hard to translate? Why?
From audience perspectives-
What did you notice in the movement?
How did watching each movement study influence your attention to the environment?
Did the movement studies convey anything to you about the original ‘visiting places’?
What happens when three or four movement studies are performed simultaneously as trios/quartets?

 

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  • VIDEO
  • Eiko and Koma
  • River