The workshops for ‘I live in it’ are slowly moving from games and explorations to building pieces of choreography. Ellie and I worked on a simple structure, where standing in a circle, each person turns to the one side to do a short sequence and then to the right, alternating between two partners. The little sequences came from work we had done thinking about parts of the body we felt ‘friendly’ with. Ellie and I had taken some time to sort out this question. If the question was about what parts of the body we ‘liked’ then straight away it became about judgements “people always say I have lovely hair” for example. We thought about this different way in because we hoped it would elicit different responses, and it did. We heard about loving to have your hair brushed, the help that hands have given, the joy of twining your hands with your toes in the bath…the reliance on hands for a fiddle player. These turned into simple gestures and duets, and Ellie chose from them to create the circle dance. One of the older woman, turned each time she had had her hair ‘brushed’ in the sequence, to say thank you to her partner. It is fascinating inhabiting other people’s gestures. It is a reminder that in movement work your are sometimes expressing what you feel inside, and sometimes you experience a feeling or a sensation because of the movement you take on.
