Effort Lab: Improvisation Workshop
Course Description
Summary
This class will introduce students to basic concepts of improvised dancing with particular focus on effort. Class will begin with an embodied check-in and a gentle warm-up. Weekly exercises will move students through various investigations regarding effort, from organ systems to Buddhist teachings to personal preferences to the laws of Physics. While the course's references will be wide-ranging, the objective of the class will always be to learn by doing and to physicalize knowledge.
Through improvisatory dancing and writing, we will map out our relationships to effort through demonstrations, dialogue, charts, and maps. Effort Lab will have moments of high and low effort in order to ask: What feelings arise when our effort doesn’t match our circumstances? How can we calibrate our effort so that we’re giving an amount that feels right?
This class is open to movers of all experience levels.
Learning Outcomes
- Personal awareness of self in relationship to the culture of a space, a room, an environment
- Listening, speaking, moving, and creating in a collaborative environment
- A broader and more complex understanding of effort through various cultural lenses and an embodied perspective
- Demonstrated capacity to improvise using effort as a compositional tool