Movement projects! Yay! I was absolutely floored and moved by the work of my colleagues. Absolutely and most definitely so. I know that pretty much all of us were approaching the movement projects with a lot of trepidation and fear about our own lack of experience in movement and so on and so forth. I know that I was super stressed/nervous about it. But I think all of us got a lot calmer the day of. All of us were freaking out the nights before, but when we got there, there was this calm and trust that we weren't expecting. At least, I wasn't expecting it.
Truthfully, I really struggled putting together my movement project. I didn't have issues coming up with the story or finding music, I got my idea and music fairly early on, it was just the manner of how to tell my story and how to fill the music with movement that really gave me a run for my money.
I knew I wanted to use the My Fair Lady Symphonic Suite I found on YouTube for my music, but it was 17 minutes long and we had a 5 minute limit. I spent a lot of time one Sunday just finagling with the audio and trying to figure out where to cut and how to cut the music in a way that still told the story I wanted to tell while still sounding sort of alright. The edits I ended up making were rather abrupt in their transitions from one piece of music to the next, but they weren't the absolute worst things ever. The transitions bothered me musically since they change keys and there's no lead up to the key changes that make the musician in me feel satisfied, but I think the edits sorta lent themselves to what I was thinking I wanted to do in my project.
The hardest part of this thing for me was just filling the time with movement or things to do that still connected back to my story. My first few attempts at walking through the music and figuring things out, I found myself flailing a lot just trying to keep moving and not be 'boring.' The issue with that was that the movement I was doing was not tying back into my story. The story of my piece is still pretty much the same as when I first was theorizing about it in an earlier blog post if you wanted to cross-reference that. :) But my piece in a nutshell was about moving past seeking validation physically from men and finding worth and acceptance in self.
Anyways! I got. Frustrated at myself. I was struggling coming up with things that would blend with the music and I was just kind of butting my head into a brick wall at times. There were a few moments in my piece that I knew exactly what I wanted to do and how I would do it. But those moments aside, I still had 2-3 minutes of music that I was struggling to fill in. The moments that I knew what I wanted to do were the beginning, middle, and end, so it was all about the transitions and actions leading up to those moments in the piece.
I had to step away from my movement project for a hot second cause I was feeling rather loathsome about it and myself and I slept on it. The next day, I had new ideas and things fell in line fairly quickly. Idk if I was just mentally, physically, and emotionally tired the night before, but the good night's rest really did me a world of good and I was finally able to make some good headway on my project. It took me a few other days to figure some other stuff out, but I had a better idea of what I was doing.
I think my biggest struggle was just trying to create a basic structure of things I could do as opposed to strictly choreographing it and making everything precise and absolute. Trying to think of things that would lend themselves to a level of improvisation was incredibly difficult for me, but I'm proud of myself for sorta figuring it out. It's all still a work in progress, there are things I want to hone in the next movement project we do. During my presentation, I found myself flailing in certain spots due to adrenaline and nerves, but overall, it wasn't bad and I'm happy with what I did. I think in my next project, I want to try playing around with stillness more and minutia of movement and how small things can create a narrative. I mean, I'd still be moving, but I want to try things on a smaller scale as opposed to leaping around and bouncing across the whole room in a wild frenzy. I thought Ben and Willoughby's movement projects really demonstrated the power of simple, powerful physical motifs that were constant and how those interacted with their movement was beautiful. Those folks are awesome. <3
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