Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Immersing Myself in Music Through Dance.

For a few years, I was a dancer/performer in an Independent Winterguard based in San Marcos called Identity. A winterguard, for the many who have never heard of it, is a competitive and artist sport that blends contemporary and modern dance with the utilization of flags, rifles and sabers set to music or sounds. The group I performed with was very much like a family to me, and we spent over 20 hours a weekend training, dancing and rehearsing for competitions around the state and the country.


An exercise we frequently did was dance improvisation – My instructor would stage us around a dance studio, give us little to no direction and put on a song for us to improvise to, using each other as partners, or just being by ourselves. There was one song in particular that she put on towards the end of our competitive season – and one of my last performances ever, and I never knew the name of it. You see, these improvisation exercises were to get us in the correct mind set before an actual performance so that we are in character and are “checked in” to the show, and right after the exercise, there were little to no words and we lined up to go to the performance site and do our thing. I didn’t really get the chance to ask what the song was, and it didn’t have any words. However, I will always remember quite vividly how it made me feel.


Our performance song was Falling Slowly by The Swell Season, so our improvisation songs were sad, romantic and very, very beautiful. I was feeling particularly emotional at this show, and was trying hard not to cry while I was improvising to this one anonymous song. I had to completely immerse myself in the music, feel it, and interpret it in my movements. It made me realize in a physical sense something I’ve always known about music and sound – it can not only affect how you feel and how you think, but it can also be used to *express* to others how you feel and think, be it through dance, or moving picture, or even just by itself.

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