Interpretive Dance

" Interpretive Dance is a form of dance that uses movement and gesture to express emotions, ideas, and experiences. It can be used to represent obstacles and obstructions, as well as the challenges that people face in overcoming them." (McGlothern, 2023).

An example they give in the article is "a dancer might use interpretive dance to represent the challenges of living with a disability. They might use slow, deliberate movements to represent the physical challenges that they face, and they might use sharp, angular movements to represent the emotional challenges." (McGlothern, 2023). They also added that props may be used to physically show the obstacle in the space.

Therefore within the creation process, we explored the idea of using sharp angular hand movements to show the idea of frustration and used rope as a physical obstacle.

The Obstruction Technique

The Obstruction Technique is a method where “In a defined phrase of movements the dancer is held back by another person by holding his/her hand and must at the same time carry out as much of the original phrase as possible.” (Granhøj, no date) . We used the method especially when looking at obstructing one another through the use of contact, and I found that it reconstructed the phrase we already had made, as the movement became much smaller. This method was effective in showing the restriction to the dancer’s movement as they were being held, pushed, and pulled by the other dancer.

Similarly, we used this influence in the contact work when trying to obstruct one another. I showed the dancers this at the beginning of the rehearsal as a method to show them the quality of movement I was looking for in this section. We noticed that the movement appeared more rigid and less controlled than what we had previously been working with, and there didn’t seem to be much care when passing through moments of contact from both dancers. This was also made evident as they didn’t appear to look at one another very often.

Chance Dance is a technique that was used by Merce Cunningham which included coin flipping, and improvisation to create choreography in a sequential pattern. Within my rehearsal process, I wanted to take my own approach on this method by asking the dancers to choose 6 numbers 1-10 and take a piece of paper (relating to a body part) from a pile for each number. The numbers related to a movement quality or direction and the idea was that each dancer would create two separate phrases from this sequence.

The body parts included:

Head
Shoulder
Elbow
Wrist
Ankle
Knee
Hip
Spine/ Back

The movement qualities/ directions were:

Twist
Circle
Cut
Swipe
Spiral
Linear
Sharp
Suspend
Weaving
Ripple

Bibliography:

Encyclopædia Britannica (2024) Merce Cunningham, Encyclopædia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Merce-Cunningham#ref1134996 (Accessed: 22 April 2024).

Granhøj, P. (no date) Obstruction technique, Obstruction Technique. Available at: http://granhoj.dk/obstruction-technique (Accessed: 25 April 2024).

Klubki (2011) Contact improvisation 1972, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FeSDsmIeHA (Accessed: 25 March 2024).

McGlothern, J. (2023) Overcomming obstacles with interpretive dance by Bard Large Language Model, Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@songroyal/overcomming-obstacles-with-interpretive-dance-by-bard-large-language-model-4c4fd9dc8efa (Accessed: 20 April 2024).

Early Contact Improvisation - 1972

Chance Dance - Merce Cunningham