Creating a memory object for movements

 Sunday 23  May 2021,

Update on projects:

It's been another interesting year. Janet has started a fine art degree at Hong Kong Art School. At the beginning of the year we worked on adapting her Bestiary to an Art History timeline. Then we worked on various school projects. Recently we have been reading through the book and reviewing our memory palaces, which still only go up the the first 20 countries. The amount that fits in the house. 

Today we tried a new thing. 

I bought some nice wooden toy shapes in Muji about a year ago with the intention of carving them into tactile objects.  Recently I've been intending to record the hormone yoga poses I'm learning with my friend Lisa but I haven't done the work to set it up. Then Janet and I together started a different class with Lisa (who is in fact primarily an incredibly talented historical bassoon player, living in Belgium and now teaching on Zoom). She is teaching us Egyptian folk/belly dance and we are absolute beginners. We practise a bit before we work on our memory projects on Sundays (we meet up most Sundays from 4-6pm) and today we started reading about using objects. It hit me, let's combine the learning projects. 

We made a list of what we could remember of what we've learnt so far. They are in pairs of a simple move and an interesting variation. 

hip drop
hip drop step back

slide
slide - 8

up-down
up-down shimmy 

twist
twist circles

And I counted the faces on the objects. There are 26! That's interesting, eh? As it could actually combine with a bestiary. 8 triangles and 18 squares

Then we each came up with marks that could be carved into the balls and be tactile and distinguishable. It's an experiment. They come in a box of 12 so we aren't worried about messing it up. We'll use the wooden not-balls (do-deca-hexa-hedron? No, do-deca is 12 sides... rhombicuboctohedron) to practise the moves we are learning and add new ones as we go. 

I've been thinking I should cut away the negative space so the shapes are more distinct, but I'm trying some of each. 

I plan to make one for the yoga project too. That project involves:

    5 basic techniques, breathing and energy moving (something to know, not an activity)

    8 warm up actions - very fast - maybe use the triangles? less room for detail.

    13 actions - the last harmonisation visualisations goes through all the 7 chakras with different types of lotus petals etc so could be 13+7

TBC

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Janet's Story

hip drop
hip drop step back

slide
slide - 8

up-down
up-down shimmy 

twist
twist circles

So I was learning Egyptian dance with Tanya, Lisa is our teacher and we have 8 moves. The hip drop one is the basic move and I decided to use semi-quaver with a link line on time. Just to imitate the hip muscle squeezing up and dropping down. For the hip drop step back I use the same symbol but I added a small arrow pointing back between the two circle part (we call it fermented soya beans in cantonese). For the slide move I use a snake shape (like the snake candy you get in a supermarket) because we are sliding like a snake. For the slide 8 i add a 8 in the corner . For the up-down I draw a belly with two legs and I add two arrows, one pointing up and one pointing down. For the up-down shimmy I use zig zag lines to draw the stomach. For the twist we need to twist our stomach muscles without moving our chest and the body parts above the chest. So you feel like you are twisting your stomach like the cartoon characters which got their stomach twist in a big knot. And so I use a curve line to represent it. And finally for the twist circles I use a circle to frame the curvy line.