Peggy Hackney Work...

When performing Hackney's work, I try to relax into the floor and the movement flows smoother. Breathing helps me to relax into my bodily structure. When I perform floorwork you can see that my body is usually relaxed into the floor and I loosen into my breathing. I continue to portray this when standing as I feel that as the sessions go by I am beginning to feel a lot more relaxed, and this is starting to show in my dancing.

Here shows a video of my performance in class through Peggy Hackney's work this is one of favourite sequences; click on the Youtube link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPxrOI2oO8g&feature=channel_video_title 

In this video you can see that I am trying to relax into the floor. I attempt to use my head-tail connectivity to pull my body forward and backwards, side to side, to give a sense of length to my movement. I feel like when I move from kneeling through to second position, I use the length of my leg and more to pull away from the spine or core of the stomach to pull me around, whilst reaching with my arms in the opposite direction. This is a nice feeling when going through the motions, as you can feel an 'opposite attraction' occur amongst the body. I continue to release the cranium from side to side and it looks like a 'flopping' action. This shows that I am relaxing the muscles in my neck, face and spine to begin the movements. The head leads the movement followed by the curve (contraction) in the abdominals to pull the rest of the body around to a foetal position. Using the tail to pull back the the body, and activate the stomach muscles again to pull the legs up and over to my stomach (an X shape), keeping the muscles contracted to pulling over to lying on my back.

This exercise feels very pleasing. I feel like I am relaxed but my muscles are doing the complete opposite and are contracting. It is an extra-ordinary experience as I can feel my breath inside of the body circulating whilst I am moving through the space. When I dance this phrase I feel like no one else is in the room, just me. I feel like I can move around my body not having a care in the world about anybody else in the room, as I am centered into myself. I am concentrating on my movement and breathing through and into it.

 

Here is a video on travelling:

I could do with deepening and moving through my plie's whilst also thinking about curving from my center. All of the movement in this sequence comes from the center. I need to start thinking about this in all sequences and perform them to the full.