Movement and Affect Workshop
Today I did a wonderful workshop with Ursula Neuerburg-Denzer, a performance faculty member at Concordia University. The workshop was about the embodiment of emotion, how we portray it, how we feel it, and how it effects us.
For a full explanation of the technique we used today, please feel free to
read Ursula Neuerburg-Denzer's article
here.
Essentially we were dealing with 9 different boxes labeled with Sanskrit emotions that we had to enter and perform in according to her direction.
This seems like a simple task, but I come away from the workshop exhausted, and definitely having learned something about myself. First off, performing an emotion without having anyone to bounce off of except yourself is extremely difficult, and made me question all of the stereotypical ways we portray emotion that may or may not be true.
Secondly, she made us do exercises where we shifted the amount of internal and external intensity. I noticed that when she uped the amount of external intensity, I had a hard time not letting my internal intensity go down. It raises a lof of questions about the differences between how we act and how we feel.
I haven't processed everything from this workshop yet, but it definitely made me look at my own emotions and interactions in a different way. Things to think about.
Another great supporting text-
Gil, Jose. Metamorphoses Of The Body (Theory Out Of Bounds), Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (March 1, 1998)
What I'm listening to today: