Expanding vocabularies

Four arrived for Drawing through Moving yesterday – a good number for partnering and whole group work.

This is an Introductory workshop series, run on a casual drop-in basis, so numbers vary from week to week.

Much as I plan each two-hour session, what actually ends up happening is shaped by chance events including the weather, who comes, and what directions suggest themselves in the first activity. A workshop can be entirely improvised around one simple theme. This theme may be the one planned, or one can emerge.

The planned theme for yesterday’s workshop was transitions between extreme states, in anticipation of exploring Antarctic landscape change.

The theme that emerged was extending personal vocabularies through dialogue. This coincidentally reflected what I have been doing through the Antarctic Animation website.

The outcome of the session was that by the end of it we could individually identify and articulate a preferred aesthetic quality. We all agreed that these had been expanded through moving and drawing in dialogue with each other.

Reflecting on how this came about, here are just some of the activities that we did:

Walk forwards, backwards and sideways, with varying the amount of energy.

Focus on how a loose, relaxed body can respond to different uses of space, time and energy in walking – connectivity between body parts.

Practise a defined move of reaching up and rolling down – in place and locomoting.

Elaborate and subvert the move – vary use of time, space and energy.

Clarify what qualities you bring to the move and enjoy that.

Respond to others, moving in relation to others in the room in turn, picking up on what you sense of their qualities.

Experience transitions between your own and what you perceive of another’s qualities.

Bring the dance to a resolution – an end – through your own quality.

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Drawing dialogues in pairs, with no talking:

Sit on the floor and either end of a long paper scroll.

Draw towards each other – transposing the qualities of their dance onto paper – mindful of a clear beginning.

As you draw closer to your partner, choose to allow or not allow their marks to influence you own and you move past each other and through their drawing.

Find a way to conclude the journey – at each end. Your end is another’s beginning.

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Talk with your partner about what happened.

Listen to what the other pair experienced.

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Work with the same partner:

Pairs take turns to dance their journeys – using the drawing as the score.

and to draw the dancing pair – drawing without looking at the paper.

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Share experiences.

Drawing, we found ourselves moving freely between perceptual and abstract representations. Sound became a link between movers and drawers – rhythms could be heard between the sound of dancers and sound of charcoal applied to paper.

Body shapes assumed while drawing reflected the marks being made.
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Pairs negotiated to take home shared drawings.

The scroll drawings can be animated, to map the journey through the dance.

Next week: Moving in drawing in response to Antarctic texts.