Last night was Tony Osborne’s final movement improvisation workshop for the year.
All his sessions had began with a simple activity to relax, and to provide a structure within which improvised material might suggest itself.
Last night we began breathing into motion, and into voicing.
Beginning on the floor, lying with eyes closed, we became aware of the natural motion of our bodies while breathing.
Then very small movements of the limbs followed, rising and sinking, initiated by breaths. After a slow transition from floor to standing, the rhythm of the motion remained throughout the rest of the class, and became the structure for my solo improvisation at the end.
We each took turns to improvise a 3 minute solo, and to say one thing that we enjoyed about each other’s.
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Words suggested themselves from my breathing motion. It was as if my breathing expanded into the space beyond me.
I was the wind, and inside my father’s overcoat: at the same time protected and exposed to the elements.
The story of my family’s passage by ship from New Zealand to Australia followed. I was nearly 5.
My body drew the distances around the room, between my father and I riding the storm above the decks, and my mother and sister, seasick and hysterical below.
Distances grew, between the cloying sickly female warmth below, and the male strength leaning against the world beyond – and into the icy wind.
Lots of metaphors here: the coldness of the ice in my father; the raging heat in my mother. Conflicts and distances, madness and fear.
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Feedback on the solo by the others was that structure was very clear, that the space was shaped suggesting great distances between places and people, that the narrative emerged naturally from the movement, that the story made sense.
My feeling now is that last night I tapped into what drives me to know more about the Antarctic experience – to know what it is to endure the elements my father had confronted as a seaman – and to find connections between hear and there, and the male and female forces.