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!

Interns: Building and Adapting Phrases

By Laila Fatimi

This week, we’ve been working on building phrases. Before building a phrase, Nicole had Elyssa and I read a chapter from “The Intimate Act of Choreography” by Lynne Anne Blom and L.Tarin Chaplin. While reading the chapter, a few concepts stood out to me. One: there should be a distinct beginning, middle, and end to each phrase no matter how long or short. This gives the phrase a structure. And two: There should be a high point at the beginning, middle, or end of the phrase.  “The impulse serves as an impetus out of which the movement flows necessarily and organically” (Blom & Chaplin, 25).

 We then had to build phrases of our own, using what we had just learned. Once we finished our phrases, the task was to  pick 3 characters, and represent each character through the same phrase. Depending on the different characters we were focusing our phrase on, we would emphasize certain parts of our movement. For example, make our movement slower, or make it faster. The characters I used, were Carmon (from Spy Kids 1, 2 AND 3), Gatsby, and Willy Wonka. 

 For Carmon’s version of my phrase, I made my movement quick and sharp. A drawn out develope turned into a powerful kick. For Gatsby I made movement slower and more grand. And finally, for Willy Wonka, I made the phrase slightly faster, happier and added a couple skips in.

 This exercise taught me how to adapt a phrase, just by changing the feeling behind the movement and to make the phrase own a different identity.

Works Cited

Blom, Lynne Anne, and L. Tarin. Chaplin. The Intimate Act of Choreography. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 1982. Print.