Last Friday (6th February) in our second lesson at the Drill Hall, we explored spaces around the area that could be filled by our bodies. This exercise was influenced by Willi Dorner’s ‘Bodies in Urban Spaces‘, which “invites the residents to walk their own city thus establishing a stronger relationship to their neighbourhood, district and town”(ciewdorner) and made us recognise areas in the site which would otherwise be overlooked by passers-by. My group explored the cafeteria and the courtyard in front of the building as we wanted to explore the places that most visitors to the Drill Hall will see but never really notice properly. We felt the outside contained the most interesting spaces and made us manipulate our bodies more than the cafeteria did. When we were asked to create a performance with the spaces we’d found, my group decided that by making the rest of the class inhabit the spaces we found, we could have all spaces inhabited at the same time and they could experience our process themselves. As we had to direct the class through the performance, this seemed to almost replicate a drill. And so, when we were asked to then develop the performance further for our lesson on the 10th we chose to start it as a drill by having the class march the length of the studio in lines, and then we introduced them to 5 exercise movements that we developed from how our bodies were shaped when we inhabited the Drill Hall’s courtyard. For example, abdominal crunches were derived from the image above.
From this performance, some of my group (including myself) became more intrigued by the idea of developing what we had to possibly make it into our final performance. We discussed possibly using the layout of circuit training and somehow incorporating it into a drill and making it an interactive performance for the audience.
Works cited
Cie Willi Dorner. bodies in urban spaces. [online] Available from: http://www.ciewdorner.at/index.php?page=work&wid=26%3C/span%3E [Accessed on 12/2/15].