When Ondrej told us to hold our partner’s hands and walk around the room, he might not have anticipated such liveliness. Maybe, he may have anticipated more activity. What we presented to the movement class instructor is unique to the specific batch of j-term students at the particular time. No other group of students or instant would produce the exact moment that we enjoyed during the last exercise. In the same context, none of Ondrej’s planned situations for the class would exact to reality. We decided to walk or run to a certain direction at the moment we make the decision. Even the followers decide to turn and proceed in a particular way with agency and purpose when they are given the circumstance. The leader, observing the follower’s reaction, in turn, react to the reaction and modify her next decision. Hence, the class was an improvisation. Yet, among the absence of structure, all students create harmony by not colliding with each other and Ondrej forms more rules accordingly.

Trajal said he would jump here and there, both figuratively and literally, to gather inspirations for his creation. He would do the same for the class as well. He started off with his explanation of the objective of the class while we stood at the very corner of the rehearsal studio. He then explained the significance of a studio to an artist. The class then took an unexpected shift to reviewing the choreography that we practiced. When each student showed their dance to one another, we all sat down to discuss various themes from the Paris is Burning to Judith Butler. Leaps between each step of the class were unpredicted and abrupt. However, interestingly, Trajal anticipated that the transition was spontaneous and frequently commented that he would now jump. Hence the class was an improvisation. Through the improvised class we could receive more personalized feedbacks on our dance and gather information more relevant and of interest to us at the particular moment.

The final component of the class, too, was an improvisation for it was based on the first two components. If Trajal had not talked about Judith Butler and her feminist theory of gender performativity, the psychological internality of gender would not have been the topic of discussion for an hour. Small topics and themes that Trajal brought up during his class formed greater debates and created the large bulk of the lecture seminar. Although readings are independent of the former two parts, they usually become supplementary that enrich the discussions caused by Trajal and Ondrej. Apart from its dependence on the earlier parts of the class, Professor Levine creates an unarranged environment for us to share ideas as well. Her showing of the video of Beyonce’s “Countdown” and the positioning of it beside Anne Teresa’s choreography, be it planned or unplanned, sparked another fruitful, yet unaccounted, debate that fed the previous discussion on transcoding. This improvisational aspect of class is what makes it more attractive and relevant.