It's starting...

So I tried out the workshop with Fiona’s dance students, including the post grad we’ll be working with at the secondary school. We started with some automatic writing to mentally limber up, and then watched the Liz Aggiss film. I forget how conservative most young people are and I’m now wondering whether it was a bit too weird for them! It did produce some astonishingly good writing though… They then paired up and read each other’s work and then interpreted it in movement before regrouping to discuss the process. These are some observations

1.Although many of them didn’t punctuate their writing at all, their dance was filled with phrasing which is the mark of a good dancer. Fiona says that they learn these ‘dynamics’ quite early on and would naturally punctuate any improvised dance. It occurred to me that your Year 9 dance students may understand how phrasing can add meaning, and it may be an opportunity for them to teach non-dancers in a ‘critical friend’ way.

2. If we don’t do the critical friend approach, it would take too long for Kate to work with each piece of work. I think a smaller group would work better than a whole class anyway.

3. The automatic writing that the dancers did yesterday was, on the whole, amazing. I do this at the beginning of all my lectures and business writing seminars and it’s always the same. People are astonished when they look at the page and see a part of themselves that they didn’t know existed! It seems a missed opportunity to not make more of this and I’d like to think of a way of capturing this.

(This is exciting...)