Dancing in Portugal: Movement after another

In this class I learned a lot of new thing about the improvisation. The basic things you have to keep in your mind is the level of the movement, the direction of the movement, the rhytm, the dynamic, the tempo (speed of the movement: fast, slow, pauses) and the contact to another persons and the balance inside the group (fill the space differently, choose different directions than others -> have the balance inside the group). When you keep these elements in your mind, you can create lots of different and varieting ”choreographies”, which are interesting and also suprising for the dancers but also the audience.

By changing these elements and using them actively in different improvising exercises, you can create lots of different series of the movements. Only by changing direction or the rhytm, the same pack of movements comes totally different and it is completely different from the original version and for the viewer, it is totally new ”choreography”.

We did also excellent exercise where we first create five different movements (A, B, C, D, E) by ourselves. We practice this for a while and then showed it to the teacher. Then the teacher said another way for the letters (for example B, C, D, E, A) and we had to learn this by changing the order of the movements. After we had done this, we had to do the serie of the movement from the end till beginning.

For changing also the order of the movements, we can create every time a new series of the movements and it looks always different, even though the movements are the same. And this all is improvisation, because creating movements comes from the first thought and we don’t create absolutelly right order for the movements. And always in improvisation there is something, which is not the exactly the same than before. Sometimes it can be also very scary for the dancer, because you are not sure what is going to wait you, when you are presenting your improvisation choreography. But this gives you a lot of freedom and excitement for dancing.