Sensing Weight in Movement

At the start of the reading Ravn described how she felt in classes about sensing your weight which I connected to. I have had to do this in class and the feeling of if you’re doing it right or am I feeling my weight correctly. As a dancer we have a relationship between mass and gravity and we explore it during training and learning technique.

“According to philosopher Shaun Gallagher’s phenomenological descriptions, proprioception is, in its most typical form, a pre-reflective and non-observational awareness that allows the body to remain experimentally transparent to the agent who is acting (Ravn, 2010, 29). I believe that this means what we do without thinking such as walking; standing upright we do these things without thinking.

Overall the feeling of weight reveals two things, two different dimensions one focused and one connected to an overall sensation of what their bodies feel like.

Is Contact a Small Dance?

In contact Improvisation there are two different performance modes, the behavioural and the relational, these can merge in to several different performance forms. When learning CI we have to take responsibility for one’s self and what we are doing.

“In other words we learn to use our bodies in necessary and efficient ways in order to relate to our environment and a moving partner.”(Brown, 73) We have to become aware of one’s body, what it can do, what it needs and how we need to take care of it.

Bibliography

Ravn, S. ( 2010) Journal of Dance and Somatic Practice. 

Brown, B. Is Contact a Small Dance? Contact Improvisation Sourcebook I. Vol. 6.