Trying something new - Day 5
I was starting to feel frustrated in my improvisations in the forest by the instability of the ground, and how careful I had to be. I really miss having a large, open, safe space to travel across and take up space without being inhibited by the uneveness of the floor or the trees around me. So I took a break from working in the forest and instead starting working on something new. At the moment this experiment is not as closely linked to musicality as my previous explorations, but I think I need to build up some new skills and learn some more basics before I can start to work with command over musicality as well.
This was my first time working on this apparatus, and I guess lets call it what it is - a slightly too high off the ground tree swing. I couldn’t resist the new freedom and challenges that came with working on the swing. I’ve always had a fascination for aerial work, and although I have very little experience and by no means claim to be an aerialist, I think I can work creatively to develop a practice playing in this setting. I’ve really been missing the possibilities of lability and inversion, and being airborne that I find in contact improvisation, so I think this is a perfect setting to play around with those skills. I think working on this can help me develop skills in balance, flexibility, strength, (hopefully) poise, and even if this practice can only exist in this garden, on this swing, by this tree, I see no reason not to pursue it and see where I can take it. Just to be clear this video is not filmed or edited artistically or particularly thoughtfully, but again is meant to be a grab bag of inspiration that I can refer to and help myself build up a vocabulary of movement. The music is lovely (with Khalid) by Billie Eilish, and I only chose it because it’s one of the tracks I was listening to whislt experimenting.
The biggest challenge of this is hands down the dizziness, I’m not quite used to it and I definitely took the spinning too far the other day and had to lie down for a while. I really want to work on transitioning between movements, and finding the other movement possibilities with the swing. And then as I mentioned I would love to be able to eventually integrate musicality into this practice, but I first think I need to develop better command of my body on the apparatus.
