End of 2021 I was approached by a member of our Acro & Yoga community in Dublin with an improvisation project. Ethan is a composer. He was looking to develop an improvisation project with music, acroyoga and image projection, where partner acrobatic yoga style movement is improvised to piano or other instruments where there is an exchange between movement and music. I was intrigued. I volunteered with Sean Kelly, my long time acro partner. Even though I'm confident in doing acro with Sean, sofar we have never quite got to a level to be confident to perform. It's one thing to learn the moves, to flow from one pose to the next, but to do that with grace, in a way that is interesting to watch is an entirely different story. I dream of being able to do that one day, but just like with most things I think I'm too old, I don't have a dancing background, and many many other excuses why it won't happen.

Before I had my daughter, I'd go to sleep imagining a beautiful acro dance, I'd come up with new sequences in my head that I wanted to try the next day. Sometimes I'd manage to remember, or remember some parts, but never enough to bring a whole choreography together.

Now, I'm looking for inspiration.

The best way to unleash creativity, or find inspiration is to just start doing what you want to be doing but have no inspiration for. „Like you can’t drink water without opening the tap” – Ethan said. So just start moving, Connecting.

Initially Sean and I were a bit lost about where exactly we were heading with this project, but each time we met to experiment, a very interesting discussion arose. First of all, for me it was very exciting and new to receive input from someone with no background in or much familiarity with acroyoga to be giving his opinion on the way we moved in and out of poses, and how it felt to him as a spectator – what was attractive and was boring maybe.

He asked questions that made us think. Some of the observations on Ethan’s part were very interesting. After our first practice he recalled a moment of our flow with Sean where we fell off the pose after a pop and instead of stopping altogether we just continued the flow turning the whole movement sequence into something else. We learnt here that failing or falling is actually an opportunity to create something new, to start a new idea, in movement terms that could mean separating from our partner, dance by ourselves, flow on the ground, re-connect with the music, and then maybe find our way back to each other once more.

Other suggestions from Ethan included making more pauses, holding poses for longer than feels comfortable and waiting to see what emerges from there, practice exiting from and entering into acrobatic poses, and explore different levels in the physical space. He also pointed out that sometimes not moving, not doing anything can also have its own meaning, can play an important part of the story itself. He suggested also that we could also explore remaining in a pose and just add small movement variations with the hands for example – still interacting with the environment and with our partner without really moving much.

The idea was to find a way that music could depend on us, the bodies and shapes in space where at the same time the bodies depended on the music being played. During our second session Ethan experimented with a kind of 3D imaging application, which traced our body while moving in space and created images filled with dots scattered around – similar to a Rorschach test.

The wonderful thing about improvised movement is that you can fully let your body go, switch your mind off, and let that spirit (breath!) guide you. If improvised with a partner there may be moments when the two bodies and personalities fully unite. In the moments of separation I often feel some intense sensations, feelings of emptiness, nakedness. I feel alone all of a sudden…it makes me

uncomfortable. A key challenge for me here is to find comfort again on my own, unsupported. Comfortable in my body, comfortable with my own thoughts. Comfortable with what I know and can share.

This harmony and flow which I often feel in certain moments especially when dancing/doing acro with Sean – as it turns out – isn’t always the perceivable by the audience. Ethan at some point mentioned that a certain movement sequence we were quite happy with Sean wasn’t exactly interesting for him as a spectator, while something else that felt simple or unchallenging for us was a memorable moment for him. How could that happen? Complexity of movement versus aesthetics. The two things are not the same. How can we transmit to the audience that a particular movement feels good to us and that our body is fully in sync with the environment?

From this controversy arose the idea (from Ethan) to work with a graph. Now we started to bring in Math to the equitation – go figure! You would think art has nothing to do with mathematics, but as it turns out, you have to calculate each detail down to the bottom and that will help you unleash all the potential for creativity. So the graph initially intended to bridge the gap between what was visually

attractive and what felt good to the performers.

“Improvising through forms” – that was the next idea. To sort of compile a set of movements, poses that could blend into one another, and basically improvise the transitions from one pose to the next. Maybe even try to quantify somehow the complexity versus aesthetics of a movement and represent it on a graph where Y represented complexity and the X axis represented aesthetics.

Finally, we designed a matrix. Again, a very technical approach to something that supposed to float in

air!

As Ethan put it: Connecting with music – how choreographed should it be? Complete improvisation of both acro and music requires extremely high levels of perception for sound and an effortless mastery of the variations of acro transitions. In order to achieve a level of intention and flow, create “forms”. This would be a series of poses that transition smoothly from one to another. Then, add

variations of each of these poses so the form exponentially increases to eventually be improvised. This would be considered “improvising through forms”. As opposed to free improvisation which has no form or spontaneously created forms.

Hence the title of the piece was born “Shapes of Sounds”

As I’m writing this summary of our experiment I’m also thinking that this development process is key to understanding what will happen on stage. Could then this account of the experiment be shared with the audience during the performance? If yes, what would be the most effective way of doing it?