Breath Phrasing/New Solo

This weekend I'll be presenting a new solo, "HOME", as part of the end of semester show where the work the grads have been working on this summer will be presented. The solo I'm presenting is a beginning of a larger work that I'll be developing over the next year or so. For the second section of the solo I'm using a variation of a structure I learned from my music for dance teacher, Norma Dalby, in undergrad at SLC. Norma created a way of notating music that used the breath cycle. She would work with a group of musicians to coordinate their breathing - everyone breathed in and out together - depicted above by a single arch (inhale, then exhale). Then, along the arch, she would put marks that would signal when the player was suppose to play a specific percussive instrument (red marks). Each musician would have a line of arches for each instrument they played - again, see diagram above. We did this in music class and it was very cool and challenging. Over the last couple of years I've been playing with bringing this structure into a dance context by coordinating the number of movements per breath. For example - in this solo I start doing one movement that lasts the length of one complete breath (in and out). After doing this a couple of times I divide the breath in half - one breath with the inhale and a second with the exhale. Then I do two movements with the inhale and two with the exhale. Lastly I play with my movement phrasing - sometime doing one or two or more or less movements with a breath. This organizational method creates an organic development to the movement and its intensity - moving from meditative to quite dense.