user avatarEsra Yurttut // Teacher
user avataraydin teker // Teacher
user avatarDefne Erdur Eligible Member // Teacher
IDOCs » On Time and Body Awareness
This is a short video and written feedbacks of two dance teachers on a time and body awareness exercise created by Esra Yurttut. She has been doing this exercise for years with diffrent groups, receiving interesting feedbacks. İn the video you will see the exercise is done by Aydin Teker and Defne Erdur.
2012.06.09

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Each action takes the same lenght of 2 minutes for this video. However it can be applied for 5 min./3min./1 min. for each part.

 

1.part : sitting in silence without movement ( in a meditative mood)

2.part : add talking (in any language or sound ) without moving at all

3.part : stop talking, continue only using hand gestures 

4.part : start talking and continue hand gestures

5.part : stop talking, continue hand gesture

6.part : back to sitting in silence without movement 

Please watch the movie now and then read have a look at the feedbacks below.

 Aydın Teker:

 1. Not easy. To blink my eyes all the time, bothered me a lot. I was almost feeling guilty. Not being able to do what I have to do properly.

2. I preferred to make sounds. To create sounds without using my face was interesting. I really enjoyed some of the sounds I created. 

3. I realized that I can not use my hands alone.

4.Talking and using my hands caused me to have a nervous breakdown. Maybe the problem was related to the previous section. 

5. I do not remember what I experienced on this part. 

6.I think I calmed down here.

In general, I can say that I had difficulty using my hands. It was difficult to use my hands when I was not using my face. I think I could not accomplish what I had to do. I found myself making judgements. But it felt good to have the nervous breakdown somehow. The hands after was like calm after a storm. It was not important what I was doing. I felt good that I was still able to stand up after such a hustle. The silence at the end could have lasted longer. The guilt feeling I had at the beginning was not there anymore, even though I was totally lost about what I was supposed to do at that instant...

Defne Erdur: 

1. It was so difficult to stand still in silence. My mind and my eyes could not stop. And I felt uneasy and guilty somehow.

2. In this stage, I chose to say what was happening in me, in my mind. I said it out loud. It helped me to relax a little, yet the silly and meaningless this I started to utter made me feel stupid again.

3. Just moving my hands made me fall into a void of some kind. If I do not have anything to say in my mind, why move my hands? It feels as if I need not move at all if my mind is calm and empty. I did not want to move in this stage, it felt pretentious.

4. I felt "ohhh, this is me!" at this stage. I talked and moved freely. I felt so much at home. Although Aydin was laughing next to me, it was so easy for me to continue and even answer her, get back to my conversing etc. I realized once again that I am a multi-tasker for sure!

5. Again. Unease. As if my hands are a cup and if there is nothing to put in them (if I do not talk while moving them), the cup looses its meaning too.

6. I wanted to stay in this state forever. It was so comfortable. Funnily this was so short of a silence compared to the uneasy silence of mine at the 1st stage. As if I started to appreciate the importance of immobility at the end of this 12 minutes.

In general, more than "time awareness", this practice helped me to reflect on the relation between my thinking mind and my moving body. It was nice to see how my being as a whole has various layers and how these layers function in relation to each other. I think this exercise, can be used for concentration and jumping board to dive in to a more intense work for awareness and stage presence. Face to face and back to back versions could also be interesting... 

I would be interested to see a performance coming out of this exercise as well... (Why not Esra? We seem to be ready to work together with Aydin on that :-) 


Attachments:
aydin defne oturursa

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Comments:
user avatar
Kerstin Kussmaul Eligible Member // Teacher
2012.12.06
hi esra, how did you come up with this exercise? i mean, why did you choose hand gestures / talking for a time aware exercise? is it meant as a measurement for time for example...i am interested because defne describes her attention going to the relationship between thinking mind and moving body... i want to try this as well, the video looks promising. thanks for sharing.


user avatar
Esra Yurttut // Teacher
2013.02.01
Hi Kerstin,

First of all thanks for your interest.. :)
Time awareness is the one title . Yes, this exercise creates much space for awareness in general.
However I prefer to put name of "time awareness" to get focus on it and dont think so much what you are doing with the body or what are you talking about... After one does it, s/he can easily realize what happened without expecting before hand...

It is more effective as a 'time awareness' exercise when you do it 1 min. , 2.5 min and 5 min.
Than you can go more deeply to the exercise and observe the chances through the time.

Sometimes I change the focus of exercise. For example; I am doing this as a practise for actors, they use their character's text and do the exercise with this text as they have eye contact with the partner. It creates strong relation with the partner. It also creates space for stillness, explaning with the body and telling something with the words (even with sound or words without any meaning). It is effective to seperate each of them too... and you experienced the connection between 3 actions and how it feels when you doing it seperatly.
Therefore it is good for build a relation with someone. If you do it to the wall or to the audience it has another effect.

Honestly first time I tried this exercise with the very hard actor group. They were completly out of consentration and it was so hard to make them be quite . It was my idea to gather them in a clear action and try to build group energy and action awareness...

So it really worked very well and we did it couple of times with using different time lenghts for all series of action. We observe the time's effect to the each action... So that's how I started using that exercise, but of course anyone is free to change its focus and utilise it however they want/need.


user avatar
joachim schwendenwein Eligible Member // Teacher
2015.07.24
inspiring. I think I am going to integrate that into my work with managers learning to improve their bodily awareness in communication.
Aiming to give them an idea of physical presence only without spoken message. I will let you know what experiences I make with it.


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