Improvisation Distillation in the forest - Day 3

Stepping in and out, clinging and falling, crunching and twisting.

Looking up the rain fell on my face
though the trees protected me.

I left the sound as the rain in this video, although its a little quiet so to hear the rain you might have to turn it all the way up. This day felt different in that I didn’t have my speaker with me so I was playing all the music in my headphones. I also ran here instead of cycling. It was a dull and dreary day.

What I noticed about these recordings were I was much more thoughtful about my movements. I noticed myself really taking time to figure things out, whether that was how I was gripping the tree, where my body weight was, how the ground felt underneath me. I think that having the music playing internally relieved the pressure of an external performance somehow, and felt more like an exploration. I also found that I was not able to tell, or even guess which song I was listening to by looking at my movements, which I don’t think is necessarily positive or negative. It’s impossible for one body to be able to emulate the complexities of a piece of music to a level of such precision that you know the track without hearing it. That’s one thing I need to keep in mind. I noticed that watching these videos back I was able to tune more into how the surroundings see me. Watching the videos without sound really quickly put me into the mindset of how I look from an outside eye, because the contextualisation of the music I’m dancing to is missing. The missing music also allowed me to much more quickly edit down this video, I think because I wasn’t being captured by my relation to the music, and so was just looking at the movement on its own. I tried to keep in both sections that were visually interesting, as well as some moments of figuring out, of solving a problem.