National Choreography Month - Day #1

by Nicole Harris

Welcome to National Choreography Month!  To celebrate off this exciting month we will be posting choreography exercise prompts and videos from Aisha (and some other surprise guests!) throughout the month.  We hope you'll be able to see where some of the ideas come from and how different people interpret the same exercise.  

To get us started we turned to a book that we visit OFTEN in rehearsals, when teaching or just when we're feeling stuck.  Karen was lucky enough to study with Lynne Anne Blom during her time at Northwestern.  Lynn's book "The Intimate Act of Choreography" has become a staple for choreography classes and choreographers around the world.  If you don't already have a copy, what are you waiting for?!  It's available through Amazon.  Today's exercise comes from chapter three: Speaking Body

Here is a short excerpt from Lynne leading you through an improvisation she calls Body Discovery:

"Take a look at your hand.  Suppose you'd never seen one before.  Notice the slight hollow on the inside, the lines around the bumps.  I wonder what it can do.  Can it walk?  fly?  jamble?  Come on, hand, try to ripple, spurt, stiffen, quiver, clench, scratch, hang, pulsate, drum, point.  Maybe you should give each part of it a chance to move by itself and show off a bit.  It likes that.  It's getting all excited!  It's hopping all over the place.  Hey, it's running away.  Let it go; go on, get rid of it.  Throw it away.  I mean, really throw it away.  You have lots of other parts.  [Apply this same process to the face, spine, feet, hips, head, etc. One by one, throw those parts away once you've explored them.]"

Interested in participating in National Choreography Month?  GREAT!  We'd love to have you!  Just send your video of today's exercise to Nicole at MonkeyhouseLovesNicole {at} gmail {dot} com or post them straight to Monkeyhouse's Facebook.  (Please note that we will not be able to post videos with content we don't have rights to.  That includes music!  So while you can use Beyonce as your inspiration, you can't actually have her playing in the background.  Thanks!)  Keep an eye out for new exercises and videos on Facebook all month!