After three months of being away from daily technique classes it was an amazing feeling to be back in the studio, moving and exploring again. Knowing that this class is the beginning of the end with it being my final year of this course added a sense of drive and urgency to my body today, a feeling of this is the time to focus all my energy into my movement as the number of classes left to really explore myself counts down, my body had a sense of speed and at times panic, this should calm down as the routine of being back in education setlles in but for now I am enjoying this enbodiment of power and passion in my body. I took this feeling and this class as and opportunity to practice self control of my body's sometimes relentless energy and focus on being precise and eloquent througout my body, the use of breath helped me to do this. Regulating my breathing to conicide with chorography helps me to relax in to the motions, allowing myself to move deeper through them and working my the deep muscles within my centre. I found this made excercises a lot more natural and less forced or rushed, I was suprised at what my body could do when I simply try and relax. Relaxing through the excercises was also more enjoyable and gave me the chance to really fill out the excercises and explore where my body can reach, twist and soar.
Limon technique focuses primarily on encouraging the breath in movement to encourage the use of weight in the body and using that with gravity to explore how the body falls and connects with the floor yet recovers itself to standing, how we can move through these constrasting ideas naturally as performers. After class I was intrigued to know more about this technique so reserached into Limon and found his company site very inspiring. There is a video on http://www.limon.org/About/Founders.html that gave me a lot of information about Limon as an artist and his background which I feel will help me understand his movement a lot more as the classes develop and continue.
I found elements of this technique came quite naturally to me, the use of weight and gravity in the body is an element which works well with my body's drive yet still allows me the chance to deepen the movement and explore my use of the breath and how this helped my move through the space and especially sequences on the floor. Relaxing into the floor and letting your body move against it is paramount, not only in Limon technique but in release and graham also. It allows you to feel the weight of your body as opposed to holding it to create the illusion of weightlessness, moving through the floor is something I can sometimes feel uncomfortable doing, this class however, helped me over come that. Being told that the precision of the movements is not paramount but the dynamics and relationship in space were allowed me to really attack the excercises in terms of my weight and gravity without being too concious of the intricate details of the sequence itself.
Limon techniques requires a lot of our deep core muscle strength from the psoas and transversus abdominis to really engage with the movement and control the gravity which affects our bodys throughout Limon technique class, by deep focused breathing and pressing the belly button to the spine throughout class helps to strengthen and engage those muscles making the movement more precise and adaptable in the body.
Class today made me question what kind of dancer I am, and what kind of dancer do I want to be? I would say at the minute I am a weighted dancer who explores how momentum and gravity move the body and push the body into different pulls of force and drection but a part of me does want to experience the weightlessness illusion that ballet dancers portray and if possible is there a way I can create myself into a blend of the two?
