Understanding Choreography: Motor Skills, Expression, and Body Movement
Understanding Choreography
Choreography:
Coreus: Space
Grafia: drawing, writing.
Usually, when talking about choreography, we refer to a set of exercises accompanied by music. However, this term encompasses much more, adding richness to the work.
Key Capacities in Choreography
- Motor Capacity: This capacity enables the full development of the body in space and time, encouraging students to coordinate and evolve these three components.
- Physical Capacity: Developing this capacity means developing basic physical qualities to varying degrees. Therefore, the activity can be adapted to any age and situation.
- Cognitive Capacity: This ability should always be considered, offering students the opportunity to make decisions, present needs and interests, solve problems, discuss them, and develop memorization processes.
- Expressive Capacity: Reinforces the personality of students, promoting disinhibition and all aspects of bodily communication at an interpersonal level. When speaking of expressive power, we must consider the area that develops body expression. Body expression, as a result of reflexive perception of expressive movement, should focus on the presence, awareness, and experience of the body as a whole in motion.
The Importance of Basic Motor Skills
Basic motor skills are essential for survival and progress in relation to the environment.
- Locomotor Skills: Basic motor skills characterized by locomotion (jumping, running, walking).
- Non-Locomotor Skills: Motor skills characterized by the management and mastery of the body in space (rocking, twisting, stretching).
- Projection and Reception Skills: Motor skills that stand out for the projection, manipulation, and reception of objects (throwing, catching, kicking).
Expression and Expressiveness
Expression: The act of saying or expressing in words what you meant to imply, or giving an indication of an emotional situation through looks, attitudes, gestures, or other outward signs.
Expressiveness: The ability to vividly show what one thinks or feels. We say someone is expressive when they possess this ability to a high degree.
Body Expression Purpose
- Personal growth, pursuit of psycho-physical well-being with oneself.
- Learning bodily codes and meanings.
Types of Tasks
- Disinhibition
- Awareness
- Knowledge of the expressive possibilities of the body, the recognition of the qualities of movement.
- Creativity
Axes of Movement
Sagittal Axis: Imaginary line that crosses the frontal plane from front to back, allowing lateral movements such as abduction and adduction of the arms or legs.
Horizontal Axis: Imaginary line that crosses the sagittal plane from right to left or vice versa, allowing anterior-posterior movements such as flexion and extension of the trunk, walking, tumbling forward, backward, and so on.
Longitudinal Axis: Imaginary line that crosses the longitudinal plane perpendicular to the ground, allowing rotational movements of the head, shoulders, hips, etc.
Plane / Axis Relationships
- Frontal-Sagittal
- Sagittal-Horizontal
- Horizontal-Longitudinal