Date of Submission

Spring 2015

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Dance

Project Advisor 1

Leah Cox

Project Advisor 2

Jean Churchill

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Artist’s Statement

This project consists of two dance pieces, “i need love to feel strong” and “Each Other,” as well as a piece of writing documenting each work’s process of creation, intellectual underpinnings, and reception by audience members.

Arthur C. Clarke writes in “Out of the Sun,” “What is life but organized energy?” I ask similarly, what is choreography but organized life? These dances were organized with the intention of displaying the lived experiences of me and the performers I worked with in a non-narrative, abstract, expressive format. Each piece is a portrait of my collaborators and me. The pieces I make have varying objectives, but they are unified in the hope that a stranger seeing my work for the first time will leave the theater feeling as though they know me and the performers.

Performance is a way of being with other people, perhaps one of the deepest ways I know. When making group pieces, I strive to create an ensemble in which each performer feels a deep sense of comfort and acceptance from their fellow performers, allowing them to be generous and vulnerable with each other, and ultimately for an audience. I have heard it said that one can make dance “to make people feel less alone.” I would contest that I make dances to make people BE less alone. I have previously thought of theaters as sterile, isolating spaces, but it occurs to me after making both of these pieces that the theater is a space in which we can allow ourselves to be together, feel together, and move together, if only for a couple of moments.

These moments are fleeting. The dance is ephemeral, obviously. It evaporates into thin air as soon as it comes into being. The memory of this closeness to other people, however, has the potential to linger, perhaps only for a few minutes, perhaps for a lifetime. This is the paradox of live performance, its fragility and its power, its death and its longevity.

Thank you for reading.

Thank you for watching.

Thank you for being.

-Liv

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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