never fight a clown...

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Learning or Remembering…


When you are first shown choreography or a sequence of movement – do you try to remember it, or do you try to learn it? What is the difference between remembering choreography and learning choreography? 

Surely in order to remember something, you must have had an experience. If memory is the facility by which we remember, and to remember is to recall something from our past: let’s call it an experience for the sake of this musing. Then it would follow the experience is attached to the memory. So, when you are first see / or are shown something you aren’t trying to remember it because you’ve never experienced it. 

This helps us understand and develop a better attitude and approach to learning (not remembering… yet) choreography. Then the follow-on line of enquiry lies with the question – how long does it take to effectively learn something before we start moving to remembering it? 

It may be more beneficially to keep one’s mindset in the learning phase rather than shifting to remembering too soon? Regardless of whether one is a visual, verbal, aural, kinaesthetic or a blend of all four learning styles, we all take a different amount of time to digest choreography. It may therefore be prudent to keep these two points separate: learning and remembering. It may help to develop a clearer strategy on what and how you are learning through a variety of specific focuses in the learning phase in order to help with the remembering process.

Furthermore, even when we are remembering choreography in the context of a rehearsal for example, we inevitably will be given notes, so we have to shift gears back to the learning phase to re wire our neurological pathways so that we adjust our memory (experience) of the choreography.

Also, in the mix is pre-existing knowledge of movement for example you may already be an advanced combatant so some sequences, techniques or moves within the choreography may be ‘easy’ however the combination presented to you is new. Or you maybe learning choreography from scratch with no combative (stage or ‘real’) experience at all. Either way it may help to keep learning and remembering as two distinctly different modes and strategies to ensure that you know when you are operating in either mode.

To be continued…

3 comments:

  1. Neither and all of it. Does it make sense; for the character, for me as a audience, for the story. This however starts before this. I try to teach basic fundamentals of martial arts and movement. From where does the power come from, how does the body work, what is our misconceptions about movement and power etc. For me this is the learning about one self and expressions. For the choreo, it is the remembering of the movement and expressions.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hello 'unknown' - explain further not sure what you mean? cheers

      Delete
  2. Hey Scottie,

    Memory is a personal thing. I would expect people to operate differently. But for me personally...

    I try to learn the choreography so that I can forget the choreography.
    Or perhaps I want to forget *about* the choreography. The choreo sits in the subconscious primarily, and appear in the moment or 'just-in-time'. I want it to show up based on the moment and the other person in the moment.

    In this mode it feels more like I am letting go as I learn, instead of trying to hold on.

    That's an ideal of course. And some choreography (or in some circumstances) needs to be foregrounded and memorised in a very conscious and deliberate way. Held tightly in the beginning practice and then released!

    Mostly I don't want memorisation to preoccupy me once I get to rehearsal. I want to be able to do it (the fight/ the scene) with and for my colleague actors. The choreography comes because of their actions and behaviours draw it out of me.

    Worth mentioning that there is the 'templating' we do as teachers, where we work in a 'feeder' mode. We feed the choreo to the student in a conscious and mindful way, completely linked and following (while leading) them. To be honest my conscious capacity is usually exceeded when I am teaching (even my own choreo) and I just go with the flow and hope I remember (because I almost always do.)

    I will confess I am not sure how my memory functions in this teaching state. It feels like it is just by necessity.

    T

    ReplyDelete