My Second Week with Monkeyhouse

Week two of my internship with Monkeyhouse began with working on my resumé. Nicole and Karen helped me build a new resumé, explaining that some things that I didn't think were important to be in it, are actually key to my resumé. For instance, when talking about the many years of dance of my dance education, they explained that talking about different dance conventions can show future employers that I was interested and willing to go out into different communities to learn from renowned dance icons. Some of which include So You Think Dance winners, and Maud Arnold, from Turn It Up Dance Convention, and well-know celebrity dancers and choreographers from The Pulse: On Tour.

Throughout the week, I worked with a piece of writing from my sophomore english class. The assignment being to write a language autobiography, which could be defined as anything; Speaking a different language, talking about a favorite book and how it change who you are, or like me, how dance is another way I speak, and am able to communicate. This piece of writing is something that I am extremely proud of, because it not only talks about dance, but how dance helped me grow and find myself as a person suffering from an abusive relationship. As I prefer to keep the topic between my instructors and I, I will (try to) explain how I took dance and this piece of writing and create different movement phrases from them. Karen started this assignment off by having me take three verb sentences from my language autobiography, and creating three movement phrases from them. These three phrases I weaved into one, long phrase, which I refer to as "the verb phrase." The next day, Nicole had me create three separate phrases from my writing. I had to choose a sentence from the beginning, the middle (the apex,) and the end.

• Beginning: "We dance to be truthful with our innermost thoughts, and to express them not through words, but through movement."
• Middle/Apex: I prefer to keep this line private.
• End: "Dance through all of the pain, and in your blood; But most importantly, dance when you're free."

From here, I was given the task to put the 'verb phrase' in where I thought it made "the most sense" with the beginning, middle, and end phrases. I was able to change the order of the phrases in a way they made the most sense to me, that order being beginning phrase, middle phrase, verb phrase, and then the end phrase. 

Nicole wanted to play with the idea of using different emotions with my phrase. We wanted to find different ways that I could do certain movements to make my original phrase more interesting. We began with the idea of yelling, where I took the articulation of my fingers and created moments of being off balance. Next, I had to do the phrase as if I was pleading. I discovered that I moments of pause, and moments of reaching to my full extent added a new kind of draw and appeal to my phrase. Playfulness was the hardest to work with, as the original phrase is almost melancholy, taking a completely opposite emotion was hard to work with. From that, I did take the use of my plié can add a nice sort of 'bounciness' to certain movements. Lastly, we used the idea of 'whispering loudly,' which I enjoyed the most, because of the use of elongation, and being able to start my movements small, and gradually make them as big as I desired.