Sweet Design phrase

Today I will start teaching the Sia "Sweet Design" phrase which we will add to over the next three weeks. I plan to film these in Week 11 as solos (or duets) for your final assessment.

You can find the phrase at this link

Sia

The first 10 x 8 counts is the original phrase, then it will vary to the video adding some of the other material we have worked on this trimester. The first side (L) runs from 00—40 seconds, and the second side (R) runs from 1:27—1:55

and PS...Here is a link to the phrase with our 2017 additions

2017 extras 

So crack out the unitards!

Strategies and styles

We learn using three main sensory receivers—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (VAK).
We mostly use all three modalities but one or two may be dominant so I try to find ways to present class material using a mix.

For the visual (my dominant preference) I describe movement with other visual imagery, demonstrate with my own body, video demonstration and feedback, get you to draw pictures.
For the auditory, I use music and my voice to cue timing, information, qualities, I describe what I'm doing, I ask for questions, I encourage you to feedback with each other.
For the kinaesthetic, it is about getting into the movement material and learning it by doing. This is why I sometimes give a scan of the material by demonstrating a complete phrase before breaking it down. I also incorporate various tactile exercises, often in partners, so that physical information is transferred by touch and sensation.

Last week I asked you to draw one of the sequences, to graphically notate it. You were creating a visual map to help you learn the spatial pattern, while also attending to listening and following the timing/accents with the music in real time, and physically drawing the tactile qualities on the piece of paper.

Here's some examples placed next to each other.

It was a strategy for learning a phrase from a range of angles.
I would encourage you look at different strategies for your own learning...try drawing or notating a phrase, video it in class for playback and rehearsal outside of class time, work with a partner on a phrase and use touch to indicate an impulse for or direction of the movement...

Breathing

Breathing is our most vital activity...it sustains us...it is what keeps us alive.

I often talk about remembering to breathe in class...more than that, to consciously work with our breath to access the dynamic range of our bodies. Releasing breath to release tension, to open joints, to soften into the floor, to propel us through space.

In yoga practice, the cultivation of breath, or pranayama, is one of the eight "limbs" or stages of focus. It often takes much longer to find, than finding the "poses" or asanas, probably because the breath is so connected to our emotions. Look at the patterns of breath when we are anxious or fearful, the way it is more rapid and shallow.

Right now, move away from this screen, or put down your device, and take five long slow breaths.























What happened?

You took the time to notice your living, breathing body.

You may have let go of muscular tension, of thinking, of propelling yourself into the places where you are not and need not be (in things past, in expectations future, in spaces virtual and impersonal).

You opened yourself to the potential that can sustain you as a dancer and as a human being, the realisation that your breath is oxygen entering your bloodstream, moving around your body, and moving back out into the air....air that moves into other bodies, plants, weather patterns, tides...that, through breathing, we are connected to everything and it sustains us.

Air is a matrix that joins all life together.

"About 1% of the air we breathe is made up of argon, an inert gas. Because it is inert, it is breathed  in and out without becoming a part of our bodies or entering into metabolic transformations... these argon atoms mix with the atmosphere and spread around the planet in such a way that each breath you take includes at least 15 atoms of argon released in that one (of your breaths) 

a year earlier."

(David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance, p. 37)

Every breath covers the area of a tennis court, 40 times greater than that of the skin—moving through the film of the 300 million alveoli of the lungs.

(Tufnell & Crickmay, Body, Space, Image, p.23)