This week’s session was based around Nancy Stark Smith’s Underscore. We touched on this briefly during our improvisation module last year but we watched GLOBAL UNDERSCORE with Nancy Stark Smith to refresh our memories. Using the underscore to guide our contact jam this week will have a huge influence on the movement as there are rules within the score to follow.
The notion of the underscore made me very anxious to begin with. The idea of having all these things to thing about on top of all the other things my mind must be focused on whilst improvising with another body made me very apprehensive. However, once we began to move this jam fast became the one I have thrived in most throughout my practice thus far. The structure I at first found restricting soon became second nature, and once I could view the underscore as a set of tools to aid my improvisations rather than rules to follow, my movement knew no bounds.
Due to this new set of tools other bodies seemed more willing to experiment with new things. I found myself working not only in a duet or solo but also exploring movement as a trio and even a quartet. Although moving with this many bodies is often difficult, I find the challenge enticing and can’t seem to move away from the exploration once it has begun.
This week I found myself moving through the space without anticipation or fear. The underscore gave me such a wide variety of options to play with movement I found myself not wanting to leave the circle. I had gained a new found confidence and the influence it was having on both my mood and movement was very clear. I found myself in a constant flow of movement, working with new bodies and exhausting all the things I possibly could from the movement before moving onto a new partner. There was no point in which I felt stuck or was worrying about what was coming next, I was completely absorbed in the moment.
Bibliography:
Stover, J. (1989). Some considerations when structuring an Improvisation (to be seen by an audience). Contact Quarterly/ Contact Improvisation Sourcebook II, Vol.14. pp185
