From Design to Meaning?

I’m interested in exploring how to develop improvisation skills and group awareness.  In a group improvisation, how do you go from a design place (thinking about things like generating material/content, varying dynamics, creating temporary rules or structures, knowing how to listen and respond to one another) to a meaning place (off-the-cuff motivic development, understanding/ deciding on themes without open discussion, analysis, or explanation, recognizing and furthering a narrative, making meaning out of what starts off as random)?

These are some questions that came up for me after watching archival footage of the Grand Union perform improvisation for hours.  I had a great introduction to open-structures from Douglas Dunn’s class here at NYU, but the goal of that class was to generate material for dance and individually learn to problem solve through improvisation.  When improvisers and collaborators are working together what sorts of strategies are employed—especially across different disciplines where there might be important differences in process/design…even major logistical differences?

Dance Educator Uses Internet2

Here is a link to a short blurb about a dance educator who uses Internet2 to teach remote movement classes (about a year ago).  

 Is Remote Dance Education Possible? -- Dancing into the Future

First Assignment: make a short movie

“Batteries and Pie” (9/16/08)

On the filming/ idea process:  Making this short project was a rather haphazard process for me.  This piece originated from a couple minutes of down time in a dance studio between classes. On a whim, I asked some of my colleagues to stand up and look bored while I filmed them with my small Sony Cyber-shot camera.  Then I demonstrated an accented traveling step and said, “do that step together across the floor, and then just follow my verbal directions. This will take just a couple of seconds!”  I told them to do the step, turn around themselves, and then fall to the floor.  They performed these tasks while adding their own arms, gestures, and other distinctive qualities, and I filmed them immediately with no rehearsal.

 A couple of minutes later my colleagues went back to sitting near the mirror and having a private conversation in Korean while I thought about wrapping my camera in my warm-up socks to protect it in my bag.  The texture of my warm-up socks in the eerie florescent studio lighting caught my eye, so I gathered some up-close footage of that.  While my friends continued to talk I wondered if I could predict their foreign syntax with my hand as a sock puppet.  I found it difficult to do this and film at the same time, so that shot ended quickly. 

Before saying goodbye to my friends I told them to remain sitting where they were but take notice of something I would throw at them.  They bravely sat still looking out into the mirror, and I tossed the sock in their direction hoping that later if I somehow edited this it would have continuity.

On the editing/ finalizing process:  I strung the short shots together in iMovie 6 and played with layering the “brightness” and “softness” effects to extenuate the feel of glaring studio lights.  For some moments I also added the “speed-up” and “reverse” effects.  Then I framed the shots to try and exaggerate the depth of the long rectangular studio space using the “letterbox” effect.             

After viewing this random little dance sequence a couple of times, I freely associated bits and pieces of an accompanying narrative. The dancers look zoned-out, bored, and waiting for something, which reminded me of times I’ve milled around a kitchen with friends waiting for something to bake.  Also, the way the dancers turned reminded me of a couple of things: cycling energy like in a battery; churning and mixers used in baking; then also, a turning siren or alarm.  Using the titles effect I wrote some snippets of dialog and images to reference the story of annoyed people in a kitchen unable to turn off or take the batteries out of a broken timer.  So, they bake a cake and wait until the timer stops ringing.  

I played around with GarageBand to quickly develop a score.  Using the musical typing I played a short theme and then copy-pasted it to repeat it in a couple of loops and played with modulation by dragging it up or down in pitch.  I then added two more tracks:  one of random percussion I recorded while listening to the first track, the second using sound and corny musical theme clips provided by iMovie.  The result, to me, sounded rather cacophonous and unsatisfying at times because rhythms and clips were often out-of-sync.

“Prism with effects” (9/16/08)

There is a small prism hanging on the door to my room that I spun and filmed at different angles.  After capturing the footage in iMovie 6, I layered various effects like “earthquake” and “brightness.”  I also played with various transitions and ended up keeping only one for the transition to the last shot.  Earlier in the week I was improvising on the piano and captured some of that poor quality audio on my camera.  I layered that audio with sound effects from iMovie 6 to create the music.