One Hour Study

I have always been curious about the senses and how we all rely so heavily on them to get through our days. What happens when we lose one of them? How will that effect the way we approach different tasks that we normally do not spend any time thinking about. The was with which we even the smallest of things would be taken away. That is where I started with my one-hour study for Freshman Seminar at The Ohio State University. I am interested in doing more research about the sense of the body and how the loss of one or more of those sense affects the way we process our day to day tasks. This Is not an official research project and we do no have a lot of time in which to complete this project so I focused on just one sense and only looked at how It would change dancer’s behavior while the dance. I wanted to attempt a new form of improvisational technique to help dancers that either struggle with improvisation or are new to improvisation in general. This was particularly interesting for me because I have struggled with improve in the past, in fact I still do struggle with it at times. Finding new ways to help other dancers like myself was something that was very attractive to me. However, it took me a while the find a study that would fit my requirements without possibly hurting any of the dancers who participated, and that could be done in one hour with limited resources.

For my one-hour study I looked at dancer’s body sense while they have full use of all senses as compared to when they can no longer see via being blindfolded. The purpose of my project was to get a better understanding of how the loss of sight changes body awareness and movement. I hope to be able to apply it to improvisation techniques for dancers new to improving. This will give them a new understanding of their body and open them up to different movement pathways.

I began my study with four dancers improving together in a studio in Sullivant. Next I blindfold them and ask them to walk around the third floor as many times as they felt comfortable within a span of ten minutes. Once the ten minutes was up they were un blindfolded and asked to improvise again. Then I had them switch roles and repeat the process of walking blindfolded around Sullivant Hall followed by a ten minute improve session. After which I asked all four dancers to do a loosely structured free wright about their experiences.

I decided to use their free righting as well as videos that I took during all three improve sessions as well as the dancers walking around Sullivant Hall blind for both groups.

I expected that the dancers would take up more space after they had regained sight and were able to move through an open studio after the constriction of walking though hallways in the dark. I also came in anticipating the walking around blind to be really hard for the dancers. Surprisingly however they did a lot better than I anticipated them doing,

I was proud of the way my presentation looked all and all. When we first got this project I was honestly really worried about it, but it turns out I didn’t need to stress at all. My biggest challenge was finding the best way to present all my data so that people could understand my project without needing to read large paragraphs on a poster board. I honestly feel that, although it was good, my presentation and verbal explanations could have been a little better. People didn’t understand that I didn’t ask the dancers to actually dance blind, just walk around the building. Ion top of that I didn’t feel like I had a concrete way of figuring out how much space the dancers took up during the improvisations both before and after temporarily losing sight. I still am unsure of a good way in which to do that, I had someone suggest the ACAD studio but I am afraid it would be too hard to get into. I was also originally going to make a video to show the process sense I personally am a very visual person. However, as time got closer and closer my creative drive dwindled and I began to stress myself out about it for no particular reason at all. There for my video was never created and the photogate just sits on my phone un-used. I think that if I were to do this again I would definitely have a video component to help with my presentation. All and all it was an amazing experience and something I want to continue to look into for the rest of my time at The Ohio State University and possibly longer.