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Improve imagery improvisations with these exercises

This is an excerpt from Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance - 2nd Edition by Eric Franklin.

Imagery Improvisation Exercises

The following exercises are separated by categories, but these categories are somewhat arbitrary and overlapping. An image that produces dynamic changes requires initiation. An image that changes the surface of the body reverberates out into space. When working with a group, it is a good idea to watch each other improvise. It may be interesting not to let the observers know what image you are working on to see if they can recognize it. If you imagined yourself as a robot and everybody says that you looked like a jellyfish, you know that you need to work on that image. After you finish an improvisation session, write down your experiences in a notebook. Even extraneous thoughts and images that entered your mind while improvising are of interest. Which images were most compelling to you? Which ones did you dislike? What parts of your body are more difficult to access with a specific image? To begin the improvisation you can be standing, sitting, lying on the floor, or in any preferred position. Let the image sink in before you begin. At the end of an improvisation exercise it is valuable for the members of the group to communicate their experience with each other. These discussions are often rich sources of information on the relationship between imagery and movement.

Spatial Path

The number of spatial paths is infinite. Think of all the spatial paths you have taken in your life as lines drawn on an immense canvas. Imagine that your fast movements have made thick lines and your slow movements thin ones, and behold a design of stupendous proportions. Explore spatial paths by drawing lines on a piece of paper and then transposing them into space. Inspiration for spatial paths is everywhere - in a jumble of sticks by the road or even in a bowl of spaghetti. I once laid my head down in a hotel the day before teaching a workshop in Germany and discovered an interesting spatial path in the form of a curtain (figure 5.11).

Initiation

You can initiate movement from anywhere in the body. In certain movements, you want to initiate equally from the whole body. In others, you initiate from a specific place, such as the string attached to the finger pulling into space. The inside of the body can move the surface, such as a bag of helium-filled balloons pushing up into the sky (figure 5.13a), or the surface can move the inside, such as a bag dragging balls along the floor (figure 5.13b).