Getting new skills under my belt!

I’ve enjoyed getting the opportunity to take part in weekly workshops looking at learning new skills and developing old ones, and our first experience with this was looking at contact improvisation. This is something I have touched on during previous projects but not as extreme as this workshop, and I’ve learnt how important it is to develop a strong connection with actors you are working on a scene with and how contact is a great way to understand more about each others boundaries and how the energy changes with each actor you work with. I’ve learnt how comfortable I can get with certain actors and how I can learn to be very trusting of actors I am unfamiliar with. It was also interesting to learn about the different contact points within the body, I was familiar with how important the wrists are but learning that the hips and shoulders can be used within this practice as a way to give your weight to your partner and to fully trust that they will keep you safe. I really enjoyed the first part of the workshop and trying these exercises with different people, but I felt very hesitant looking at how we can incorporate what we’ve learnt into lifting. I enjoyed being a base for the exercises where we were using table tops, but felt quite uncomfortable being a base when we got into bigger lifts as I didn’t feel confident holding someone else’s weight and I was worried I’d end up injuring my partner. Luckily these lifts were successful but I still need to work on my confidence and focus on my breathing whilst experimenting on this, and if we get the opportunity to try something like lifts again I will do what I can to develop this.

When we were told to close our eyes and trust our partner to take us wherever they planned and let them take the whole weight of our bodies. At first I was very hesitant to trust someone I’m not too familiar with and I was very wary moving around the room as there were many people around me and I was worried about hitting someone and causing an incident, but after some time, I was started to feel very confident with my partner, focus on my breath and remind myself I’m in safe hands and I start to let my body go fully into the hands of my partner. I felt a lot more confident leading them around the room as one of my strengths is my peripheral vision and being aware of everyone around me so I create a safe and comfortable environment for my partner whilst experimenting with different techniques. Although being aware of others is one of my strengths, I need to work on being more self aware and that showed a lot in this workshop. Something I’ve also been working on in this process is feeling confident enough that I can push myself and take more risks, this is a skill I’ve really struggled with since the start of my training and I’ve finally developed the right amount of confidence to tell myself “what’s the worst that can happen?” and I definitely put that idea into practice during this workshop.

After this workshop, I went away and researched more about contact improvisation and where it originated from. It was founded by Steve Paxton, who took ideas from his previous training in Aikido which is a type of martial art, as well as taking aspects from dance (both modern and olden day style) and somatic practices (a type of movement work). He developed this skill to help actors work with taking weight, working on their balance, understanding more about biomechanics and involving different breathing techniques. Along with Paxton, many other practitioners, such as Nancy Stark Smith and Nita Little, enjoyed taking part in these contact improvisation workshops and went on to create an “art - sport” which included ideas from social dances, classical improvisation training and the martial arts skills learnt from the first form of contact improv, and they wanted to teach this skill to actors inside their companies so they could work on developing a connection with each actor, teach them a new and improved practice whilst pushing their boundaries and challenging them to take risks. I found this research really interesting and it was great to see how far this practice has come since it was first developed and what we worked on today was definitely good for pushing us and seeing what risks we could take with this method. I like getting a new skill under my belt and having weekly workshops like this will be really great for our process and seeing what kind of techniques we can include in our piece, as well as understanding more about our strengths and how we work with these new skills individually and as a company!