WORKSHOP REPORT – Wednesday, November 19 2014
10am – 1pm
Asheville Butoh Studio
475 Fletcher Road, Alexander NC
Participating in the workshop were:
Jenni Cockrell (dancer), Diana Brewster (graphic designer).
Physical Exercises:
Abbreviated Vibrations / Floor Massage, Cat Stretch warm up
Body Soundz
Creative Response:
Abstracting Adverbs
Movement Telepathy – Mirror
Feedback & Discussion.
Video documentation of Body Soundz, Abstracting Adverbs,
Movement Telepathy plus feedback & discussion.
Video Link:
Body Soundz:
·
Deep breathing – exhale on “ssshhh”, “ssss”
& blowing through lips. Then fragmented blowing through lips in short,
sharp exhalations.
·
Hang forward & humming to place sound
vibrations in resonators. Roll up, shake arms & open to “Aah” sound. Repeat
to progressively higher pitches/frequencies. Then stay on open vowel &
gradually modulate pitch up as high as possible, then down as low as possible
into the chest resonator. Also modify shape of mouth in different vowel sounds.
·
Plosives (pbtdkg). Repeat each single one
rapidly until muscles begin to fatigue. Create rhythmical, conversation-like
banter with each one separately, then combined. “Plosive Rap” – single sound on
each one p-b-t-d-k-g with “Hip-Hop” style body motions, then freestyle mixing
up plosives in any order.
·
“Wow-wee” with arm circles. “Wow-wee – kiss –
blah” to articulate facial muscles.
·
Body Drumming – patting/slapping resonant areas
of the body (chest, belly) – add voice. Interactive Body Drumming – in a line,
pat/slap the back of the person in front – add voice.
I am gradually developing a body of “Body Soundz” exercises
to explore sound that can be created by the body alone (without the need of
other objects – I may include the exception of the floor for stomping sounds in
future explorations).
I have a background of vocal training for singing and
theatre, however – as with my current movement explorations, I am trying to
specifically isolate the most basic sound concepts in the body and address them
individually in their purest form – starting in a way that feels most natural
and organic to the body.
I want to integrate sound and movement in the body so that
they don’t feel like two separate entities being imposed upon each other and
vying for attention – but sound as gesture from/of the body. This work is still
in very early stages.
Abstracting Adverbs:
This is a modification of the “Acting Adverbs” game – also
known as “In the Manner of the Word”.
In this workshop we approached this in two different ways –
as an exercise and also as a game structured in a somewhat similar fashion to
“Acting Adverbs”.
Exercise – Walking at a fluid pace around the space,
participants respond to a spoken adverb – allowing it to influence their
movement as they walk.
Game – A participant decides on an adverb. Another participant will give them a
simple instruction (we used simple actions from everyday life – brushing teeth,
making the bed, walking the dog etc). The person with the adverb will then
perform the given action in the manner of their adverb. Everyone has to try and
guess what it is. This can also be done in performance partnerships, where two
people decide on an adverb and perform the given task together – giving scope
for interaction and for task scenarios requiring more than one person.
Movement Telepathy – Mirror:
Derived from an established movement theatre partner
exercise, the structure we used in this workshop is as follows …
Partner A and partner B face each other, standing very close
together. Starting only with movement of the head, shoulders, arms and hands –
A begins to move slowly and B acts as their mirror-image. With given
instruction by facilitator, B takes the lead. They then take a step backwards
and repeat this process including more of the body. Then again from further
away. Each time the leading person is switched over, it is by a spoken
instruction to do so.
Then the partners come back to the original close starting
point. This time there is no verbal instruction given as to when to switch
leader, the movers non-verbally exchange the lead with the goal of coming to a
point of “fusion leadership” – where they are both moving together in
mirror-image movement telepathy.
They can move as close or as far away from each other as the
movement takes them, they can do any movement they wish – the only rule is that
they must stay together in mirror image. This means they always need to be able
to see each other, and also that attempting to move quickly might be very
challenging!
We finished the exercise with the two partners slowly
turning away from each other, still trying to feel the presence of the other
for as long as possible – then becoming individually motivated again to
separate in opposite directions.
Video documentation notes:
Unfortunately I was unaware of my position in relation to
the camera during the Body Soundz and completely obliterated Jenni from view!
I also failed to notice that the videotape had run out at
the beginning of recording the Mirror exercise. So the documented version is an
abbreviated example that does not show the full progression from the beginning.
Discussion &
Feedback:
This weeks discussion was more of a conversational dialogue
throughout he session than our previous “journaling & reporting” style – so
I will touch on certain points that came up.
Body Soundz – with the plosives exercise, Diana &
Jenni both agreed they found it more difficult to repeat the same sound
continuously than to skip from one sound to another – we tried saying
“kittykitty” very fast as many times as possible & Diana especially found this
much easier to sustain than I did! She also commented that she visualizes the
letters – so that lead to further discussion about letters and also words
(text) being used as sound without a literal intention of language.
I place the sound that the mouth is making into muscle
memory, so rather than using the language part of the brain as interpreter of
vocal sound, it is a gesture of the body in a specific part of the body (mouth)
with a specific placement (e.g. tongue behind teeth). We later expanded on this
discussion about text as sound in performance without the necessity for literal
meaning.
Jenni also commented on the concept of sound being a
function of the body that she doesn’t usually consider as a choreographer, but
has now been reminded that it is a facility that has potential to be
incorporated into her work.
Abstracting Adverbs – with the walking exercise,
initially there was a natural tendency to really act out and go into an
exaggerated mime - & actually
that turned out to be very fun and entertaining …. So we decided that perhaps
it would be a good starting point to go ahead and start with that extreme, then
gradually abstract the actions into focusing more on the subtle quality of
motion produced by the response to the adverb. Jenni suggested taking this into
almost un-noticeable nuances in the effect on the walk – more of an internal
acknowledgement. With these extremes of full blown comedic mime – to barely
noticeable subtle nuance, there is a wide scope of response in just the pedestrian
action of walking.
With the game of guessing what adverb the performer is using
to accomplish their given task … both Diana and Jenni immediately were able to
create little pieces – vignettes / dances. This seemed to be due to the
previous simple walking exercise.
We developed the idea for a whole narrative game where there
is one (or two) performers and the other participants each create a segment of
narrative that includes a simple action with an adverb.
For example: You are walking your dog briskly – then you sit
down on a bench drunkenly – you eat a sandwich stupidly – then you get up &
continue jogging with your dog maliciously – you reach the duck pond & feed
the ducks clandestinely … etc etc …
We also discussed the introduction of body/vocal sounds into
the Abstracting Adverbs game. This is something I had intended to do
originally, however I didn’t actually think of it while we were exploring the
game in this session. Diana suggested initially perhaps just introducing breath
sounds.
Movement Telepathy – Mirror – Both Diana and Jenni
commented on the amount of mental focus required to sustain this exercise. They
found themselves questioning whether they had initiated a movement or if it
were the other who had done it … this is exactly the kind of “telepathic”
creative response I had hoped to achieve in this exercise!
Due to the video malfunction the first time we did the
mirror exercise, we had to do another, abbreviated, version to document it for
this report. What was very interesting to note was the difference between the
first and second times.
The first time, the movement was bigger, with large,
expanded shapes, dramatic variations in level and in distance from each other.
The second time (which was recorded) the movement was much more subtle and extremely
sensitive to every little nuance each other made.
Summary:
I felt this workshop session was extremely helpful to me, as
it gave me an opportunity to really experiment and try out some totally new
material and discover the real-live responses of other human beings to these
ideas!
It was nice that it was small and intimate and felt a little
less formal than the bigger groups. There was time for more conversational
dialogue in this session and it was very good timing for that, as the previous
sessions had been more focused on making sure certain material was covered.
This session was focused on social interaction and creative
response. It feels more challenging to me to be able to structure exercises and
games in order to explore creative ideas through social interaction than with
individual self-explorations. Diana and Jenni were very helpful and
accommodating in assisting with creating functional structures for these
exercises so that the concepts could be explored interactively.
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