UNDERSCORE:
Developed by Nancy Stark Smith, it is a structure that organizes a contact improv and allows people to work together in a warm-up or an improv session. It generates a very interesting frame to share that may orient the improv and provides a language to be able talk about the experience later.
I. Sequential Aspects: These aspects of the Score serve as a guide that develops sequentially. The changes from one aspect to the next occurs spontaneously for each dancer rather than being strictly controlled.
- Arriving:
- Arriving energetically: bring the focus to the present.
- Arriving Physically: bring the attention to the sensation you have in the body at this moment.
- Assembly (optional): coming together to talk in a circle (names, injuries, how long it will last)
- iv. Pre- ambulation: (optional): go through the space, open connections with the space and the people after the talk.
- Skinesphere: What’s inside the skin, sensation, what we feel in the small dance.
- Bonding with the earth: to relax the body, to feel the support from below, connection with the floor.
- Mobilising, agitating the mass: To mix the mass with the air, by jumping, moving, to get a new organisation afterwards.
- Kinesphere: Attention to what you can reach with your limbs.
- Low kinesphere: Dome, centre on the floor.
- High kinesphere: With the centre high.
- (Maybe a moment to balance, to increase our tone.)
- Expanding and traveling kinesphere: The base of it is the connection with your centre and with the floor. Breath.
- Overlapping kinespheres: We start to be more conscious of the others in the space.
- Connections- Grazing: Short connections happening during the Overlapping Ks. Between one and the other is your solo.
- Coincidence: same time same thing.
- Confluence: two rivers that meet.
- Divergence
- Touch
- Attraction: is magnetic, you feel attracted by a body or a movement.
- Repulsion or Aversion
- Intersection: cross ways.
- Influence: music, people…
- Contrast: acknowledge that difference is a way of connection.
- Collisions: soft, they wake us up.
- Tangent: when our route meets another just on a point.
- Empathy and Resonance: I feel something from the distance.
- Shearing: from shearing sheeps.
- Engagement: At some point we start to be more implicated with the connection.
- Development: developing a duo
- Resolution: disengagement, end of the duo.
- Re-circulation through the score: Allow the sensation to continue. Where am I? What do I want to do? Don’t cut it, don’t escape to drink water.
- Open Score: We can use different ways to re-enter the score.
- Observation
- Re-Entrance
- Final Resolution of the room: The beginning of the last chapter. Each person resolves his own activity arriving to stillness where we can feel the experience of had been dancing.
- Disengagement of the whole pattern: From the stillness we imagine the group as a crystalline form, and when we are ready….end of the total design.
- Reflection and Harvest: Introspective revision of the body. And then harvest, you may write or draw or…
- Sharing: Harvest’s celebration. Listening to the authentic of the personal experience, we learn, we feel.
II. Non Sequential Aspects- Any time All the time:
- Streaming: Current, flow, stream. Small particles of light in movement (like the fffffff of the tv). Vital force. Related with the breath.
- Gap: temporal moment of absence of reference. You don’t have orientation.If we experience a gap we may focus on the streaming, for the current not to diminish, because we need it to orient ourselves. Also allow ourselves to explore the gap, we don’t have to fill it always.
- Telescoping Mind: We can zoom in and out when we like to.
- Zoom in: We concentrate on a particular sensation and we increase the focus. It gives context.
- Zoom out: Consciousness of the total composition, without loosing the consciousness of what we are doing.
- Idiot Button: When it gets too much the trying to be aware of so many things we press this button and we simplify. We feel, we breath, and if we want awareness we press it again.