Day Three continued...

Today everyone arrived at the studio with sore muscles and in need of strong coffee, there was one sore toe and we didn’t have Wayne (our apprentice dancer) so there felt like much fewer of us in the space. The previous two days were really physical with a lot of contact work and so today we concentrated more on solo work. After a really energising yoga session with Lee, we began improvising using the sacrum and tail bone as starting points. Each dancer kept a set of movements from the improvisation, which we then all went on to learn and put in any order to create a longer phrase. We then showed the phrases, with an emphasis on looking skywards. Everybody’s solo had a different feel – comical, serious, eerie, bizarre. Other aspects i.e. music and flamenco dancing changed the way it was viewed again. It was good to see everyone dancing in their own way, and what ideas they kept and discarded because, as a newcomer to the company, there are a lot of new bodies and personalities to get to know.

The afternoon moved on to more theatrical improvisations. Some beautiful moments and images came out of it. I watched the long improvisation, which had a roller coaster of moods and energies and kept changing and going in different directions with the intentions. Some particularly good moments were sometimes the simplest i.e. seeing PK still and alone on a chair in a back-to-front dress after a lot of “kafuffle”, Aurora translating the Polish and Romanian text, the shoes and dresses organising the space.

The day ended with us all in the space with Charlotte shouting words and we all had to agree on a solution. This was in one way fun and interesting but I also found it quite difficult as I really, really don’t like being left alone in the space to do whatever I want or to talk for 30 seconds on where I would rather be right now – I would much rather do a nice dance sequence… please Charlotte.

It’s been a great start – roll on day 4

Ellie McDonald