masalova-blog

[masalova-blog]

Copenhagen 2019

Hello! My name is Anastasia and I would like to share my experience of participating in a student project that took place this summer in Copenhagen!

The main topic of the project was the relation between music and dance in different historical periods. During the week-long session of classes we had several dance workshops with small lectures inside. Lectures were supposed to give us theoretical basis for understanding the topic and after we got the task that we had to perform in the end of each day. We had 3 big periods to work with - baroque, minimalism and jazz music period.

Each day started with a technique class. We had a chance to get acquainted with the Merce Cunningham dance technique with his company exdancer Daniel Roberts, then we had two awesome classes of contemporary dance with Ann Sofie Clemmensen and one class dedicated to the topic of dynamic balance by Tiziana Fracchiolla. For me the most important and useful (besides the dance technique itself) was the experience of dancing with live accompaniment. In Estonia we don’t have the opportunity to have musicians on the dance classes. In my opinion live music on the class makes you feel much more connection between the music and the dance you do. Very often when we dance to recorded music we don´t make any relations between the music and the musician who is playing, but when there is live music on the class you can literally feel the energy that musician puts inside. The greatest experience was to improvise to improvisation by the musicians, because this gave us so many opportunities and unexpected turns during the session.

Also, I want to mention the importance of international projects that gather people from different parts of the world. I think that when we get stuck in our “home” place we literally slow down our development. It is very important to see people from your field with goals and achievements different than yours. It gives you a broader view on what is going on and what are your weaknesses and strenghts.

Last, but not least I would like to say that we had very many topics to cover during this week. Some of them were touched superficially, but what is important - the project made us pay attention and notice things that we didn´t think about before. Now I have a lot of exercises and “tools” to practice on my own as well as share it with my classmates.

I would like to thank all the students from different universities, our teachers, musicians and everyone who is making this project come true!