OPEN LEARNING 3

OPEN LEARNING 3

Today’s session continued to relate to the creation of artist work packages and open art teaching, with two artists from the Edinburgh Sculpture Studio who visited the ECA last time.

At the beginning of the session we learned a very strange dance. What I describe as ‘strange’ is only strange to me as a former dancer, because what we focus on in choreography is the coherence of the movements and the shifting of weight between movements, which is important for a piece of dance as it determines the final presentation of the piece. However, this default principle limits the creative thinking of professional dancers to a certain extent, as we tend to focus on the aesthetics of the movement and the smoothness of the movement, neglecting the plasticity of the body’s expression. In this very brief study of movement, two non-dance artists create a single repetitive set of movements that have a sense of essence that cannot be imitated by professional dancers.

Today, 100 years after the development of modern dance, modern dance artists are still striving to return to authenticity and self-expression in their choreography, no matter how much they seek to break free from the constraints of movement and composition. What we see today is a clumsy piece of amateur dance, which may be our future creative vision.