Subject: "silence" and "three-part-game" by Malin Astner

silence
Chosen from my last three months of work, specially in collaborations with musicians. I have found the powerful moment of the arrival of the silence in the space. I wanted to try out and see, what could happen if I, in an open impro session put emphasis on listening to sounds and silence. What could happen to the quality of movement and the movement in space with the headpoint of silence.

I gave the suggestions within the frame of three steps:

1. Hearing, listening and opening the body to let all sorrounding sounds enter and leave, same with the sounds inside our body and in between the bodies in the room. When can you experience it as silence and how do you listen to the silence?

2. What can you do with it? What happens in you when you "hear" the silence. Do you find it powerful, demanding, limiting, paralysing. How can we deal with its power. Does it underline the movements you give it? Opening the awareness of when it happens.

3 Can you create silence? if so, can you with that silence create focus or change focus towards you or towards your partner. Direct the silence. Direct the dance with silence.

I was interested in, not only, the research of silence but also if there would come any indirect consequences caused by the focus. Would movement between silences become clearer? Would it give loudness, volume and speed to the work?

From what I experienced from the outside this did not happen. But what I found interesting to see was, with what clarity in fraceing and sequensing everybody was working. I also experienced a feeling of carefulness and perhaps a bit suppressed energy, as if we could hear a lot better and didn't want to interrupt someone else's work with being loud.

three-part-game
In the end we did a more structured exercise with a trio-task. Three people in the space, each with one specific role as leader, follower or choreographer. This exercise worked well and gave the free impro-work an interesting landscape, just by directing it a bit. It rises the questions of accepting that we are always playing a role, in every context, in every creative space, even though we are not always aware of it or can deal with it. This gave a moment of work to remember that by doing it full out, as decisions, exercising it in changes, experiencing it, this can give us the choice of using it clearly. And also just for the fun of it.

Malin