Pre-Professional Year: Authentic Improvisation

“Working with the incredible Narelle Benjamin, we were given the chance to explore the biology of our organs, fascia, cerebral spinal fluid, skeleton and muscles. I discovered how this knowledge can be embodied and enrich our authentic improvisation – an innate skill that I first started exploring in week 2 with Dean Walsh. Narelle’s focus on the physical body has helped me understand that moving in an authentic way can be as simple as feeling the weight of a limb, the rolling of a joint or the cycle of breath, which was established in the yoga class we did before every improvisation. I found that this way of working (in which we were asked to disregard the ‘shapes’ we were creating and the audience’s eye) ironically created more interesting dance, both for the dancer and the audience member. I really liked that it was about dancing for your own exploration, not for the sake of creating shapes or choreography for someone else to watch – this worked well as a contrast for the work we have done in the past two weeks. The image below is a sketch I did after improvising with the skeleton and cerebral spinal fluid in mind. To me it represents the inter-connectedness of every cell in the body, kind of like the flow and pools of energy.” – PPY17 Dancer Gabrielle Martin

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Find out more about our Pre-Professional Year 2017 course here.
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Sydney Dance Company’s Pre-Professional Year is proudly supported by Lexus.