Morrish improvisation workshop day 1

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Day 1: Solo improvisation workshop with Andrew Morrish

Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney: 11am-5pm, 19th – 22nd May.

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Andrew structured the scores to lead us gently into preforming solo before the whole group.

Scores

Everyone together:

1. Walk and wink to people as you go.

In pairs:

2. One behind the other

Back person’s hands rest on front person’s shoulders.

Front person feels the line between the hands as the focus of movement.

Back person closes eyes and follows the front person’s movement.

Elaboration: Back person moves hands to change front person’s movement focus.

3. Move partner’s body into different positions, one body part at a time, ‘sculpting’, r manipulating a puppet.

Elaboration: Make a sound each time you move the body.

4. Draw lines on partner’s body.

Partner makes a different sound with each stroke.

5. With eyes closed, breathe so that nobody can hear, breathe so that only you can hear, and breathe so that anyone can hear (beginning to voice).

Elaboration: Move to your various kinds of breaths.

6. Walk beside your partner, taking turns to make sounds.

Elaboration: Work a nonsense sound until it becomes a word you could spell (not necessarily with meaning).

7. As in a square dance, move and sound for your partner, then move on to the next person until you have performed for everyone who is a ‘witness’.

7. Move and describe the picture that comes to mind from the movement.

8. Take in in turns to move and describe the pictures that come from moving for your partner (first solo).

9. In groups of 4:

Repeat the last score for a larger audience.

LUNCH BREAK

10. Each performs a 3 minute solo for the whole group.

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futurelab outlines Andrew’s research methods in an article, Researching creativity: an experiential methodology, by Lyndsay Grant, Learning Researcher, Futurelab , Bristol, UK, September 2005.

Some words catch my eye:

Gestalt perspective

Andrew Morrish refers to the approach he employs as ‘experiential methodology’. Rather than deciding in advance what can and cannot be counted as evidence or data, researchers take a gestalt perspective in which the totality of the experience is foregrounded.

What is the data telling us?

Analysis at too early a stage limits the possibility of finding out something new – because we are looking for interpretations that fulfill our predictions. Instead, the aim is to let the data speak for itself and tell us something that we didn’t already know. Of course, it is impossible to ever completely bracket off our own perspectives when analysing data, but acknowledging and being explicit about our assumptions is important.

Categorising

She categorised the drawings according to formal visual elements, allowing the categories to emerge from what could be observed objectively rather than from premature interpretations.

… interpretation is so heavily based in the researcher’s perspective that it was important to hold back until a fuller description of the data had been completed.

What is it?

What does it mean?

The process outlined above has much in common with some methods of art criticism, particularly when looking at modern and abstract art, when asking the questions ‘what is it?’ and ‘what does it mean?’ doesn’t easily yield answers. However, answers to these questions and tentative interpretations can sometimes emerge through a process of describing the elements of the work and reflecting on personal responses to it.

Dialogue

Another researcher focused her study on an individual case…through dialogue and collaboration with the researcher…The researcher became involved in a two-way dialogue…

As well as being the focus of the research, the subject was involved as a co-researcher, with the methodology and types of data generated emerging from the collaborative relationship and dialogue between the researcher and ‘subject’. This approach again respects the whole of the creative and research experience, including the researcher’s role within that situation, and so aims to show a picture of the totality of an experience, finding ways to represent it, and letting interpretations emerge from evidence.

Andrew Morrish’s approach of experiential methodology values an appraisal of the whole nature of an experience, in which the researcher is required to listen to and sensitively respond and adapt to the emerging data. Holding off from early interpretation, allowing the methodology to emerge from the study and listening to what the evidence is saying gives a real opportunity to learn something new instead of merely confirming pre-existing assumptions or manipulating data in order to fit a theoretical framework.
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This evening I painted and animated another turning body, more alive to the connection between the image evolving from the physical action of painting itself. The marks describe journeys through the ice, at the same time describing the movement of the ice itself, marking connections between the landscape and myself.

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Posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007