Reflective Essay

1st class with Diana is very interesting: every class professor Diana asks us to take off our shoes; A dance course with knowledge about expressing your body better to send out messages and thoughts. Beginning to feel more excitement and the possible ways to live in the moment.

2nd class with Jo Blake: Every Joe's class start with meditation, he let us sit and relax our body and pretend we are swimming in a beach. It is a good exercise to me, I can feel my muscle is relaxing, and the moment when Jo say the water is warm not cold, and I can really imagine and feel the water is so warm. After the meditation, Jo let us to make our own movement and to create a dance, it is very interesting that everyone come up different movement and combines them together. I am having so much fun with this session.

Jo Blake is extremely welcoming and the way he presents himself and gives me the impression that he is a free spirit, easy going and fun. He is very active and passionate about acting, and I love his humor and style. Joe is introducing himself and is explaining the years of experience he has in performing arts. He is discussing how performing is who is at his core, it is the one place he does not hide his emotions or self. He is discussing his multiple years of experience and his accomplishments. He then explains the project he is working on with Men in Dance and that he plays juxtaposition between femininity and masculinity in his performance. He is then showing us videos of the performances he has given or has choreographed.

3rd class with Jo Blake: Start with a meditation. Professor Blake gives us a crash course on the eight basic dance moves (walk, run, skip, hop, jump, gallop, leap, slide), and then we practice leaping as a class.

Joe has given us a great lesson about performing arts and how they relate to our society. Joe lets us to play a fun game called "sit, kneel, stand". This game can exercise our speed of reflection and increase our friendship.

4th class with Diana: I learned a new dance called Butoh with Diana, which has her skills in dance mixed with a message presented, is great. The years of experience of dancing and Butoh adds more to performance art. I can feel Diana's motivating energy about Butoh. We observe different dance forms and performances by others in photos as I learn more about dance from Diana and can understand that dance takes many forms and different interpretations among different people. Diana then tells us to circle around the room as she demonstrates the feeling of energy in the center of her body and how her body reacts when the energy is transferred to different parts of her body. She then passes the orb of energy like fire to the next person as the energy is continuously passed around the room and then I receive it. I can feel my body warming up and the energy simmering through each part of my body, while heightening my awareness of each individual movement as the energy passes through my body before I pass it to the person next to me. Diana then increases the speed and unpredictable nature of the energy as everyone around the room begins to lose control and breakout into unpredictable movements.

Diana is a good teacher and pays attention to the body. I learn a lot of ways and means of paying attention to my own body, which is very powerful in my body, which can push me to act against problem. What impressed me is Butoh; my understanding of Butoh is probably the dance of using the body to express energy. On Thursday, we learn a lot about Butoh through practice. Butoh is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. It is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion.

The part of "Where is the Tea": I am apart of the first group and we all sit in a line and take seven drinks from the imaginary cups of tea that we have in front of us. On the seventh drink our tea disappears. Soon everyone on stage is running around searching for their tea, interrogating others and even looking around in the audience.

I really enjoy this performance because I prefer a performance without a voice. It's hard to convey a story by body alone, but I always did great. I have some experience in acting classes.