Dance on Loneliness

Maggie Killingbeck ran a creative dance workshop at Hitchin U3A who performed a dance on Loneliness.

I run a creative dance workshop at Hitchin U3A. We developed a 2 mins choreography based on loneliness.

We finished our loneliness project and performed to peers at a Hitchin U3A Summer event. We danced to Eleanor Rigby. With the group’s permission I explained to the audience how we had interpreted the idea and asked the dance group to demonstrate a number of the movement ideas within the choreography.

Happily the presentation and the choreography were well received. We were given a number of compliments, indeed one member said that she had found the dance very moving. I was informed also that the Psychology group intend to follow up the idea of loneliness in their next session.

The size of the group varies between 6 and 12 depending on time of year.

The style of dance is contemporary. We work on posture, alignment, flexibility and coordination in a series of directed exercises at the beginning of the class. Then we work on creating a choreography.

For the loneliness choreography project we started by reading an article about loneliness and then we discussed when and why we felt lonely.

As a result of the discussion we concluded that loneliness resulted from a lack of connection with others. Translating this into movement we explored reaching out only to find out that there was nobody there. Each member of the group established their own ‘lonely motif’.

Choreographically we then used those motifs in a variety of ways. For example we started the dance with one member of the group performing her lonely motif whilst the remainder of the group held still shapes expressing their connectedness.

At another point in the dance we created the sense of a busy street, everyone froze and just one member of the group performed movements from her lonely motif. Also we used slow motion and we worked in pairs where one dancer reached out to another who failed to respond.

Last year the group created a choreography based on the suffragettes. They performed at the University of Bedfordshire (Bedford Campus) as part of an inter-generational festival of dance.

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