Musicality- Can it hinder or help your creativity?
For the first time in our improvisation journey, we were able to include music into our work. It came to our attention that music can sometimes be the drive to our movement and act like an invasive director rather than an accompaniment.
We worked a little bit on juxtaposing the music with our improvisations. For example, if the music was made up of tribal drum beats, our opposing movement would be gentle and fluid rather than surrender to the music and follow the heavy sharp beats of the drum and vice versa.
Although we spent such little time on this, I took this from the class and transferred this rebellious skill into the jam session a few days later. Coming from a balletic background, I used my knowledge and habitual fluidity to go against the drum track. On reflection, it sounds strange. To knock out habitual movements associated with sound... with the balletic habitual movement that I have been blocking out for weeks. I must admit, it looked awfully strange.
However, when we used music that we knew I found that we would almost forget about all of our theory and we just moved. We still maintained our knowledge of habitual movements, space, time, relationships etc. but that is what it had become... knowledge! As if it had sunk into our brains that our bodies finally understood without massive amounts of concentration needed.
Have we, as a collective, clicked? Do we understand how to improvise as one?