Discuss the connection have you found between improvisation, the techniques covered and your choreographic practice? How are they related?

The journey of choreographing my solo over a period of weeks, has helped me to understand the connection between improvisation, technique and choreography. Improvisation helps to warm up my body, to feel more confident and comfortable in my own skin. I found improvisation was a good starting point as I needed to explore how my body moved before layering on a technique. Burrows refers to using improvisation and choreography as ‘cut and paste.’ (Burrows, 2010, P.26) In improvisation, we create our material and gather a set of movements, then in our choreography we cut and paste the movements to piece them together.

I began by taking on my character’s persona (the evil queen) and used improvisation to explore movement. I was able to lose myself in the improvisation and allow my body to take over, rather than rigidly setting the choreography. Improvisation enabled me to explore the sensation and the emotions first, then I was able to layer on the aesthetic.

When choregraphing, I explored the Laban effort theory in how I used movement in my characterisation and proceeded to inject this into my piece. For example, I used Wring near the beginning of the solo, in a lighter, feminine way, then it became heavier towards the end when I used it again as my character started to lose control.

My subconscious exploration in improvisation then transitioned to conscious application of techniques I had learnt in classes and decisions of the movements I wanted to include. To aid me in this, I recorded myself when improvising, so I could observe myself and decide which movement to carry across and/or reshape in the choreography.

After engaging in improvisation, technique classes and choreographic practices, I started to see them overlap in all 3 areas. After a few weeks of learning a technique, I would then notice on reflection that I had used it unconsciously when participating in improvisation. When choregraphing, I was coming up with new movements because I had been exploring the way my body moves in improvisation and learning new techniques. If I was struggling with a movement in a technique class, sometimes it would help to attempt the movement whilst doing improv and forget the technique involved. For example, I struggled to learn a barrel turn in technique class and after several attempts I was getting frustrated and those negative feelings became a psychosomatic response any time we were working on this movement. However, when engaging in an improvisation class, my body spontaneously did a similar movement. Although it potentially looked a bit sloppy, it helped me to tap into the feel of the movement, so that I could then layer the technique on later.