What did i learn 1

Again, a long time has past and i haven’t published a single post on my blog. So why do i have one? I started thinking, and i still have this thought in my mind, that maybe blogging is not for me. But now two things connected in my mind and gave me a new motivation to write. We will see how long this motivation lasts.

The first thing was Lilo’s suggestion to us (the first year students at TIP) that we try to write down once a week what we have learnt. It can be anything, even very smal and maybe not-so-important discoveries, but the main thing is to reflect over a hole week of school attendance and try to “catch” what one has actually learnt.

The second thing was the name of my blog, “Prosum” which i chose because it is a word in Latin that means “to be useful, to do good”. So hopefully by starting (and maintaining) this thread of weekly thoughts about my own learning, i can be useful first of all to myself, and maybe even to others.

So what have i learnt this week?

Mmm…

This requires some thinking.

This week i bought a new notebook, since the last one was finished and i couldn’t write any notes after class. The two days that went by until i got the new notebook and could write again made me realise how important it is to keep the habit of writing. I guess that’s one thing i’ve learnt this week.

And on a more physical level…

We were doing an improvisation where a group of people has to move every time a count is being called out (1,2,3… until 10). Every one of those “moves” is spontanious, improvised and lasts as long as the teacher (Lilo) decides, until she says “stop”. Then the whole sequence of movement has to be repeated. The different sequences (1,2,3…) are put together until in the end there is one “set improvisation” or “improvised choreography” that is made of 10 sequences of movement, different sequences for every one in the group.

There are many challenges in this excercise – first of all how to move in a way that is more or less free, not letting the pressure of having to remember the sequence slow you down or constrain you movement. On the other hand – how do you remember your own movements? Also, how do you manage this in space – a group of people sharing the space, crossing each other’s paths… of course it works the first time you do every sequence but the problems start when you try to repeat it…

As we were repeating it again and again to figure out our own movements and how they fit with the others’ i felt my sweat running like a river and i felt my lungs and my whole body screaming for more oxigen. Still i went on. Two things were new to me in this situation – one was the feeling that the more out of breath i was, the more my movement became true and the more it increased in some way. I felt i was diving into my movement and letting it evolve to allow me to keep going. The second thing was that even though i was gasping and sweating and generally feeling miserable, i kept going for more and more. Not because someone was yelling at me to do it or anything like that, but because i wanted to. This i still don’t quite understand. How can we feel this physical effort and a kind of joy at the same time?