Artist in Residence Program - Term 3 2011 Susan Russo-Robertson

Dance and Visual Art

Artist in Residence: Susan Russo-Robertson
and
Visual Art teacher: Hannah Rother-Gelder

Aim:

A dancer moulds the human form into many varying poses. Artists use dancers as subjects for their work.

Students will explore what it is to examine paintings, drawings and sculptures from a range of periods in history, and by a range of artists and go back to their source. By going back to the source of the paintings, students will be striking the pose they see with their own body, becoming conscious of the places where they feel stress, where the body feels most relaxed and where the weight of their body lays. Noticing how our body feels will help us to understand how it moves and rests in certain ways. This in turn will help students to draw and represent the human form more accurately.

Students will be asked to interpret and represent figurative paintings by Matisse, Picasso and Degas through dance and movement. They will examine sculptural work and statues of the Greeks.

They will explore movement through dance as a means of understanding the human form and understanding and responding to the art works they examine.

Week 1 and 2   

Through the medium of dance students moved their bodies into forms to create shapes. The act of using dance to manipulate the body helped them to develop a memory of how their bodies felt when “out of the ordinary” movements were formed.

When they become aware of the body moving and being still in a pose, they registered how their body felt. When engaging in the process of creating an art work based on the human form, students drew on these memories and physical responses of how their body felt in a pose.

Last week students responded to the dance movements and poses by creating a series of line drawings expressing the movement of the body and the poses the body rested in.  

  

This week students responded to the dance by creating a small sculpture. Students worked in pairs, one person as the “sculptor”, the other as the “clay”. The sculptor gently manipulated and sculpted their partner into a series of poses. They then tried to mimic these poses with their own body. The act of sculpting and mimicking reinforced, in the mind of the sculptor, how their body felt.

Drawing of these memories and allowing their minds and hands to direct the act of creating, students moulded a series of sculptures made from plasticine.

“The stillness and quietness of the room helped me to make the sculpture” Lucien.             

Over the coming weeks students will engage in the study of a variety of Visual Art works and mediums that will enable them to understand the potential for the body to move, bend, reach and crouch. They will explore the spaces and levels their bodies occupy and become conscious of how these are imprinted on their creative minds. They will link these studies to the practical dance sessions where they explore the movement of the body through dance.

Week 3

Picasso, Young Girl on a Ball

“While experiencing a variety of movement styles with skill, exploring and improvising, children learn about the concepts of dance.”

Sculpture in Movement – from a smooth curved form to a sharp angular form – working on different levels gives an awareness of the lines of the body- and how the body moves from one shape to another. This gives each child a stronger sense of movement and stillness, and an awareness of where they are in the space.

Susan Russo-Robertson

This week students were inspired by two paintings by Picasso, Young Girl on a Ball, and Women Running on the Beach.

Picasso Women Running on the Beach.

In the first dance, Susan used a drum to help the students explore angular shapes with their bodies. In ‘The Fighting Game” students were asked to move their bodies but to keep their feet grounded in one spot.

After creating a series of movements inspired by this dance game, students created a series of line drawings on A1 paper. They noticed the line drawings were angular in character reflecting the nature of, and the emotions involved in, the creation of their dance movements.

Students posed for one another when creating their line drawings.

In the second game, “The Friendly Dance”, Susan used cymbals to create a gentle atmosphere and mood for the dance experiences. In a space of their own, grounded in one spot, students explored want it is to feel and create curved shapes with their body.

They followed their movement and dance with a drawing exercise where they developed their line work, and focussed on creating drawings that expressed the feel of, and stance in, their dance work. The main focus became the study of the flow and curves of the body.

The experiences today highlighted the differing perspectives of the body when the emotional character of the dance and movements of the body are understood. 

Students understood the importance of considering the quality of the line they produced; the length and weight of line, whether the line is wavy or sharp, light or dark, thick or thin, long or short, curved or jagged. They learnt that character of the line conveyed different emotions and communicated the feel of a work.

Week 4

When we see a performance we take something of that performance away with us. It’s that special something we take away with us that has the potential to influence our own creativity and expression. This week in their dance, students used this transferal of expression from their dance to their painting and in their use of colour.

Using props of coloured tissue paper, they also considered how their choices of colour expressed how they felt and how they physically responded to the music.

Moving with the music and chasing, following, jumping, catching, and reaching for the tissue paper formed the basis of the dance movements.

This week students built on the work they did last week. Using the line drawings they created from the two dances representing opposing emotions, students used paint to further express their emotional responses to the dance.

Another wonderful week.....

The results and completed art works speak for themselves. The works represent the  ability of the creative self to project responses to performance into other creative means of expression, in this case painting.

Week 5

 

This week, our final week of the residency, it became evident that students had become attuned to the idea that dance is a language of ‘felt experience’ and that the visual art images they created were a result of both this ‘felt experience’ and their visual experiences. Over the weeks, the quality of line and form in their painting and sculptural work have developed greatly and have demonstrated how successful these combined experiences were to the students.

In their drawings, the simple lines, stripped to the bare bones of the movement and angle of the body, communicated beautifully their stance, movement, from, emotion and feeling.

As the weeks have progressed the students have become more relaxed and less self-conscious when moving and dancing, and as a result, their art works have become more expressive, free-flowing, imaginative and confident.

In this final week, the students agreed they had reached the point where they could view the Picasso painting, Women Running on the Beach, and fully understand and feel the freedom and joyous celebration that the painting represented.

This residency has not only helped the students to relate their ‘felt experience’ to their ‘visual experiences’ but also helped them to read art works with a deeper understanding, knowledge and emotional complexity.

“I felt new and free this week and my work was more focussed.” Ava

“My body feels looser and more free and fresh and my work is the same.” Alice

      

We thank Susan Russo- Robertson for embarking on this residency where visual art and dance have came together to help students discover how ‘felt experience’ can feed back into their visual art work and deepen their understanding of  line, form and movement in art.

Hannah Rother-Gelder ©