Today in movement class we repeated the group formation exercise that we’ve been working on since last week – this time, Ondrej told us to start moving in the space while still keeping track of the shifting “leader” and maintaining our formation as a group. Today I genuinely tried to let go of myself and become immersed in the general flow of movement that we all formed together, instead of focusing on the rotation of the “leader” position or trying to create my own moves. Interestingly, I noticed that it was still difficult for us to form an organic movement that would flow from person to person – whenever someone would become the “leader”, they would still often get carried away with it and start choreographing instead of guiding the flow. I think that even I myself got confused by the freedom when I suddenly became the leading person, and even though I tried to distract myself, at some point I caught myself consciously thinking of how I had or wanted to move, which interrupted the whole flow. Another interesting thing I noticed was that somehow the same people keep becoming the “leaders”, even though we try to shift randomly. Although others got to lead as well, it seemed like there were a few people – Stalina, Daniel, Marika and me – who would repeatedly end up standing in front of the whole formation. As I am reflecting now, I can think of several reasons why this may have happened, or why it seems to me that it happened. I wonder whether some people are simply more inclined to lead or follow, or if it is simply the position that they take at the beginning of the exercise that continuously puts them in that role. However, I think it could also be that only I think of these people as the “leaders” – after all, the exercise is meant to be confusing, so it’s often difficult to tell who exactly is leading. I wonder if for some reason I myself choose to follow them or take on the role of the leader, even if I’m not doing it consciously. Tomorrow I want to try standing in the middle and see if the change of position will guide my attention differently.

Something that stuck with me from today’s class with Trajal was his brief reminder of the idea of an “artistic teacup.” He explained this concept some time earlier last week: we are going to come across many influences in our life and various people are going to suggest their opinion and critique of our work, “pouring” it into our cups. However, we can always choose what we want to keep and what we want to spill out. In other words, we can always choose which influences we want to ignore and which ones we want to focus on. This reminded me that even when I’m inspired by someone else’s work, or when I take advice from others regarding my artistic choices, what I produce is still a curation of my experiences and thoughts. This is also a reminder that every piece of art is an accumulation of the artist’s life experiences, and every choice made is a reflection of that.

In today’s section with professor Debra Levine I once again witnessed how expressive movements can be. As a preparation for tomorrow’s interview assignment, we all went down into the blackbox theatre to meet Trajal’s dancers. What I found interesting that before the women even started verbally presenting themselves, they already told a lot about themselves without saying anything. Although somewhat similar, they were all laying in different positions on the ground, reacted differently as they saw us enter the room, and even the way they examined us differed. Just like Stuart Hall explained in the first reading of this class, every movement – artistic or casual – tells something.