Week Six of the course was our second week working with choreographer/director Oleg Glushkov. Since the last time our students had worked with him they had seen two of his shows. This week was filled with a lot of discussion about the shows that we had seen and about exploring principals that he had used to create certain moments that really stood out to the students.
Glushkov’s work is all movement and dance based. One movement in the body inspires another movement. Over this week our students focused on this principle. They did exercises in impulsive movements, moving together, tempo-rhythm and even human-puppetry, where one student would be a puppet and the other students worked together to create a movement story with their classmates body. Together with Glushkov they created short scenes, movement sequences and dances based on this work.
The work in this class really highlights an over all theme of this semester: engaging the artist’s entire instrument in the work that they are doing on stage. Our directing and acting students alike are studying very closely how to engage the entire body in an action, event or emotion. In Glushkov’s class it became more clear for them that what happens on stage isn’t necessarily as interesting as how it happens.