Date of Submission

Spring 2014

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Dance

Project Advisor 1

Peggy Florin

Abstract/Artist's Statement

I choreograph with the goal of filling the space with palpably sensuous experiences. As living bodies (dancer or not), we construct our own reality based on experience. The medium for experiencing the outside world is the body, more specifically the sensing body. Through sense memory, we attach ourselves to the world around us, drawing conclusions and connections according to what we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. Sense memory is a rich and compelling tool I’ve had dancers utilize in making movement that I eventually compile and organize. Although dance performance is a dominantly visual art form, I aim to engage the whole physical self, the sensing self, to communicate with my work when an audience experiences it.

Personally, dance choreography is an outlet for investigating the nuances in human connections, both on and offstage. Dance has the potential to reflect the person we don’t share with the larger community on a daily basis. I’m influenced by the strength in vulnerability, the sincerity in dancing with another person, and the generosity in sharing secrets with strangers in the abyss-like setting of a darkened theater. Dance choreography can act as a magnifying lens to the human condition or abstract elemental aspects of how we’re individually wired. The body can potentially transform into something novel or ordinary. Nevertheless revelations are made. How beautiful is the dancing body that it can rewrite history like this.

I act on sensitive intuition and an architectural eye for shapes and figures. The empty space is a blank sheet of paper and my dancers become the blueprint on the page. I’m literally building my work with muscles and bones, directing how they carve through space, how they lie still, or how they weave together to create instantaneous snapshots of human interaction. And just as an edifice has its own unique creaks, echoes, and resonance, each dancer has an internal rhythm that converses with another to make a unique phrase or relationship. The music and architecture of the human body amalgamate to create movement.

This semester I choreographed two separate pieces: Imprints of Wounded Marble, Lodestone. These pieces serve as a physical commentary on my artistic perspective—within the dance-making process, performance, and being a regular Jane looking for connections, however varied in nature.

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