I remember thinking about animals in need and the patriarchy. I really don’t like how unfair the world is. In Belgium there has been a case of a drug dealer getting a life sentence, while sex-offenders would get a few years or just a simple punishment. Talking about these things with the group seemed confrontational and scary to me.

I chose to start using graceful movements. I tried to embody the femininity in myself. This felt the most fitting and right in my head.

Why did I choose a soft/feminine quality? 

Showing you have power does not mean you need to show force or aggression. That is how I feel about it. I tried to think about a peaceful and silent protest.

Since I heard a lot of talking about feminism as well and had shared opinions about it, this felt right. You are more powerful when you can remain calm and graceful.

Eva told us to make a small piece in groups based on what makes us angry. I teamed up with Darinka, Brooke and Bronte. We made a short piece of about 2 minutes dancing about what makes us angry.

We had multiple ideas but decided to put the woman in the centre. Feminism, and the voices of women being silenced. We started with everyone doing fast and small movement, as if we are trying to break free. We thought this was an efficient way to represent the voices being silenced nowadays. 

After that, Brooke, Bronte and I proceed to use flocking while all doing slow and graceful movements. Darinka is the only one left behind still in the state of being stuck and trying to break free. We come back and try to stop her from breaking free. In the end, she stops resisting and lets us have our way.

I liked how it turned out into two groups that create some sort of contrast with each other. Darinka is the minority. The opposition was clearly visible because of Darinka being alone and us interrupting her.

She, in this small piece represents women being silenced today.

 

Patterns started emerging that we already saw in the two improvs we did before:

-Silent and slow beginning, extremely focused group. -> this created tension, said Eva and Tom. They were constantly longing for more as the sharing of our work continued. They tried to anticipate what would happen.

-Flocking. It is an effective way to represent the unity of the group and to feel the togetherness.

-The decorating of dead people, seen as the “souls” sacrificed for the brighter future we are trying to reach. 

The shocking element also makes for a powerful and intimidating protest.

For no particular reason, the beginning was always silent. It was never decided to be like this, but it just happened naturally and felt right. Not a lot of movement and very still. 

After a minute or more, you would notice these subtle movements in the whole group. People slowly falling. The element of people being dragged away or interrupted. Basically, including the opposition between protesters and the anti-protesters. 

Sabotaging each other was the goal. It turned into something on the less serious side, almost childish. Some people felt like we were mocking actual protests in real life and were not fine with it. I did not like it either. Certain individuals even had a few bruises from this because it just turned into a whole playfight. 

After remembering what subject we were working on, it all started feeling very wrong. Protests are anything but just a simple playfight. This subject is profoundly serious and should not be taken into a direction like this. It felt like I was mocking the gravity of protests.

Eva and Tom tried to initiate some feelings of protest to help inspire us even more in our improvisations and research. I do not think this is a terrible experience. You research not only to find what works; you also find what does not.

 

What we did, did not look like a protest anymore according to Tom and Eva:

-We showed a lot of togetherness in the improv sharing.

-We used the poses that we discovered in week two.

-Lifting of a dead person.

-Covering each other’s eyes.

-Everyone hugging each other.

Yet it did not look like a protest. I was very confused. The feeling of a protest should be clear.

But then I realized what was wrong. We had fun discovering so many elements in the past few weeks, but it is very difficult to maintain all of them in a single improv. It might be overwhelming to the audience with so many things happening.

We wanted to keep everything we did yet, we did not know what we wanted to reach.

What even is the intention? What do we want to reach? What is the piece about? All these questions I asked myself yet, I was unable to answer any of them.

I did not know what I wanted. It is as if I was fine with whatever outcome this process was going to have. We have so many elements that we have discovered in the past weeks. Not everything can be included in the end.

I did not feel frustrated in the end. Some ideas must come and simply go, which is a natural part of any creative process. Those ideas are then not inherently bad. You simply try multiple things and use whatever works the best.

It was week three, Wednesday and we had a new class for the first time:
 
Sound in protest. In this class with Alberto, we looked at protests and had him look at our set improv. A protest usually has chants and the sound of people talking. Even screaming. Sometimes, there would be no sound at all. I did not expect this class to have much influence on our project, but in the end, it helped the group find the clarity we needed in that week. I always felt like something lacked in our protest. We had good performances and most of the things we did felt right, But there was no sound at all.

 
the art of sound with movement

With the improvisations always quiet, we needed a change. We added one more thing to our set improv: intense panic. The first few tries of this failed before we had Alberto. Like I said earlier, we lacked sound, right?

I talked to Faye about it, and we both planned to start screaming as loud as we could. Later that day, we finally had the first self-directed. Our plan was to awaken the “terror and anger” within the rest of our peers.
 
We finished the quiet beginning piece of our improv, which is the intro as previously mentioned. The terror scene begins. It was quiet. Me and Faye look for each other and I hear them go “now.” We screamed at the top of our lungs. Naturally, the whole room followed. 

When I was walking home after that, watching the video of us screaming, all I could feel was satisfaction. The timing was how I had imagined it, and the timing of Faye and I screaming together worked very well. The method was effective. When you initiate something in a group improvisation, people are very likely to follow, proving that taking the initiative works.This scene would end with a “dead body” being one of us.
 
What I loved about this part, was the transition. Everyone silent, acknowledging the dead body. We wrapped the dead body in scarves and brought them to the opposite side of the studio, where they would come back to life and stare at the sun from the window. The scarves were beautiful for the dead bodies. 

->This was the end result of the initial idea of the decorated dead bodies in week 2.
 
Eva and Tom told us about the pure horror they felt as they watched the terror scene, and told us the transition into the dead bodies worked. I think this is exactly what we wanted as a group.

When I went home, I kept thinking about why it was not working until now. Then I realized that the only thing we needed was the shock...
 
The whole group felt confident after the final round of feedback from Eva and Tom. It was because we had found the clarity that we needed, which was the shocking into the soft transition. We also got extra reassurance after that, so we were more than ready for the sharing.

After that, this was a satisfying ending to the project and my creative process.
 
 

Around week two, on the first self-directed of the week (which is always Wednesday) We decided to have a long talk with the group because we wanted clarity and
understanding of what we were actually doing.

The group discussed new things, because we needed to start making the piece. How do we show that we are protesters and what role we are playing? I could not help but feel useless in this whole conversation of the self-directed. I had nothing to say; Nothing came to mind; It was a horrible feeling. I did my best to contribute but whatever I said did not make any sense. It is okay to have a lesser day, and I thought maybe I just needed another way to express my ideas. The group decided to have a group improvisation shortly after that. I was quite happy. I felt like this was a chance to finally express what i've been trying to say. We explored poses:

-Arms open, as if you are hugging the air

-Arms closed, hands on the shoulders, crossed

I am the one who started this idea in our improv and the whole group adapted to it eventually. It felt like something we would do in an actual protest.

I have also tried to discover movement that leans more to dance with some people. We would give each other weight and try to balance on each other. Hands coming together in the air, as if we are reaching for something.

My ideas do not always need to be expressed verbally. I can also just show with movement, without using any words. It is a quite unique way of saying things but in some ways, it is more easily universally understood. In the future, I will resort to this manner in a similar situation as the previous.

I will however, work on my ability to verbally express/discuss my ideas during group discussions.

In this piece, the dancers are all walking in the same tempo while performing different gestures with their upper bodies. They are walking like pedestrians, but their footstepts are set in a synchnonised rhythm while also doing the exact same dance all at the same time. The unison of movement is very  aesthetically pleasing to experience and examine.

Adding to that, the facial expression of the dancer are also important. In this piece, you are moving slow. The way your gaze stands and where your focus is, has a huge impact on how your performance is received by the public.
I have personal experience as I have been in similar piece before that was completely based off of this performance. 

Let me summarise and conclude: 
Embodying this piece and its rules:
- Walk in the same tempo with fellow dancers.
- Follow the set material.
- Perform with the same quality as everyone else.

This formula is incredibly simple yet so intriguing to me. The notion of unison gives a lot of people, including me, the feeling of satisfaction.