Creative Movement Questions!

1.   I am very familiar with my shoulders, my neck, my face, and my legs but I am not very expressive with my hands, arms or torso. I think that my legs are particularly alive, not because I am an amazing dancer or gymnast, because I run every day and love the feeling of harnessing the power of my leg muscles. Body awareness and movement relate a great deal to awareness of feeling, emotions and intentions. When I am aware of my body and when I am treating it well, there is a big difference in my attitude, openness emotionally and drive to achieve goals and when I am eating junk food and not exercising I feel much more blocked and stopped up in terms of energy and emotion.  
2.   I am definitely able to have fun moving around while investigating myself, others, and the way we relate to each other.  My favorite part of last Friday’s class was getting to watch and interact with other people as we built our characters from our walks.  I was amazed by the influence of the physical movements each person chose and the transformation into a character from the outside in.
3.    What I learn about the way I move and my body will be useful and relevant to my personal and professional life in many ways.  Learning how to let go of restrictions I put on my movement and how to play through movement will undoubtedly enrich the way I live.  Learning about movement as a communication tool will help me personally and professionally because being aware of the message I am sending with my body movement will be helpful in every context where I am with people and knowing how to better interpret people’s movement will also help.  Professionally, because I want one of my careers to be acting, learning about my body and movement will be an enormously important tool in building characters and improving my clarity of movement.  Investigating movement is an essential part of performance because, as opposed to a painting on the wall, it relies upon movement for a method of telling the story.  One of my favorite parts of performance is the process of exploring and building a character and movement is one of the fastest ways to portray that character to the audience and figuring out the way a character moves can be another method of building them.  

Haley. April 9, 2011. Smile: Jumping on the Bed. [photograph]. Retrieved from http://raindropsonpeonies.blogspot.com/2011/04/smile-jumping-on-bed.html