Day One, Gerri Houlihan Institute

Only at the Dance Exchange do you find a hard working cohesive group of people taking an intensive dance workshop whereby the individuals participating include movers over 60, (sorry, make that 70), professional dancers, dance instructors, the physically disabled, and young dance students. Damn right this is radical! Today (and for the next four days) the schedule will be this: technique class, creative lab 1, lunch, creative lab 2, and ending with repertoire with Gerri, running from 9:30 - 5:30 every day.
I'm not sure how to best organize this blog but given that the main purpose is to share my experiences with the dance community in a way that might be useful, I think I will focus on the use of specific tools, and then add a short section for personal response/observations at the end.
We applied and combined a couple of Dance Exchange favourites in the morning by starting off with Blind Lead (leading a partner with eyes closed, through the space) and moving into Scripting (generating movement from a written script or vice versa). An interesting twist was using blind lead as more then just an introductory/warm up exercise, but actually using it to generate movement. By having the experience of leading and following several times over we were able to recall the movements and sensations of leading and following thereby easily creating a short phrase from our experiences. We then switched to scripting by returning to a short phrase we learned in the morning session and taking a moment to "script" it, or in other words briefly describe each movement on paper. The script could be quite detailed or quite simple i.e: running hand over a hedge and pressing down firmly with palm with turn of head vs sweeping/push. we then used this script to create a new phrase. to be continued... night night for now. :)