This semester in Composition 2 taught by Susan Hadley, I have been introduced to new strategies for creating personal compositions. With these new lessons, I have acquired challenges due to my background and natural tendencies.
The floor material in the 5/8-time was the biggest challenge for me because I have a limited vocabulary of floor staccato movements that travel. I felt the accelerated tempo inhibited my ability to travel. To combat this challenge, I thought about the next natural movement I would do out of a step, and instead I did the opposite of that movement. For example, if my natural tendency was to do something in my front space, I would instead do something that moved backwards. Not only did rethinking my natural movement patterns help me come up with more 5/8 traveling movement vocabulary, in a broader sense, it also encouraged me to use planes of my body that I often overlook, such as the back space and positions where my head is closer to the ground than my pelvis. Using these less natural planes matured my choreography by allowing me to travel in multiple directions rather than just forward and side to side, thus giving my dancing more three-dimensionality.
The 3/4-time study also posed a challenge for me since I consider my strength in dancing to lie in sharp, pointed movements. Thus, I feel less confident in the circular movement quality of 3/4-time. When facing this study, I turned to music in order to find rounded movement in my body. When I listened to music in 3/4-time, I noticed the wave like quality of the rhythm, how it would sweep out like a wave on the 1 of the phrase and then pull in like the tide on the 2 and 3 to once again sweep back out on the 1 of the next phrase. Likening the rhythm to an image helped me find the quality more easily in my body as it showed me where to suspend and lengthen my body and then where to ease back. The ability to find confidence in more than one quality expands the dancer’s dynamics and the dancer’s ability to master more than one style of movement. For me, the idea of a wave helped me find the circular movement of 3/4-time by spawning continuous flow in my body, thus creating a movement through-line in my choreography.
Kelsey Kempner 