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Week 10: June 5th and 7th

This week was when I showed my final project, entitled “circle”. I opted to title it “circle” based on the idea of the circle of crime, and also I liked the juxtaposition of the title being one shape and the set design being another. I am thoroughly pleased with the turnout of my piece, and am excited to further explore creating pieces based on criminological theories in the future. Though I struggled in the beginning, the feedback received from my peers, Leslie, and dancers aided me in finding my true vision that I was able to depict in my final showing. Without this collaborative process with my dancers and feedback sessions with the class and Leslie, my vision would never have been able to be brought to life. This demonstrated the effectiveness of support when choreographing, and I am glad to know that I will always maintain support in the future through my choreographic process and growth.

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Week 9: May 29th and 31st

This week was the final week of creating on my dancers, and it was full of completion and content. I am very proud of the creation process with my dancers and utilizing on the spot choreographic choices. I struggle immensely with creating fast and articulating my thoughts clear, thus this challenge was something enduring, however my dancers stuck through it and aided me in deciding what I fully wanted to depict. Through this collaborative process, I also discovered my intent of utilizing improvisation in my piece. My goal with moments of improvisation are based on the creation process of working on the spot, and wanting to resemble this within the piece and give this sense of uncertainty. It is also connected to the concept of recidivism and incarceration, because offenders always have this sense of uncertainty and anxiety, and I wanted to depict this.

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Week 8: May 22nd and 24th

This week was showing my work in progress, and it helped me to realize that I was not on the exact track of what I had planned for. Through the comments of my peers, I discovered that my piece thus far lacked connectivity, and other than the use of barres there was a disconnection between the concept and the piece. In addition, there was disorganization in the connection the dancers had together, and the clarity was lacking immensely in my work in progress. After taking in the comments from my peers, and my own personal depiction of my discontent with my piece, I went home and devoured the material and thought about what I wanted to portray. Since I was no longer altering the music in any way, I knew I needed to utilize the repetition in the lyrics to my advantage, thus this was when I found that I wanted to depict repletion in my phrase-work, to not only compliment the composition but to also represent the idea of repeat offending. Also within this, I discovered I sought to alter the phrases in some way and this was when I had the realization to retrograde some phrases, and also completely retrograde the beginning in the end, so it comes full circle similar to recidivism, which is nick-names “The Circle of Crime”.

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Week 7: May 15th and 17th

This week was my break-through moment within the visual aspect of how I wanted to create my piece. I visualized the idea of four barres created in a square to represent the jail, and society standing in in front of the barres to represent a second layer of confinement. This finding helped me to create my process of choreography on the dancers, as we had to work with the barres. With the dancers, I explored moments of support and weight-sharing utilizing the barres, as well as investigating the movement I wanted to portray. Similar to my midterm project, I wanted to not confine my movement due to the tightness of space, but rather I wanted to create phrases that depicted this need to escape, and create movement that contrasted the knowledge of the confined space. Through working with the dancers for the first time, I was able to explore growth in my choreography through working on the spot, but also focusing on formation changes and sections not solely in unison.

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Week 6: May 8th and 10th

This week was beginning the initial phase of my research for my final project. I knew immediately what I wanted to portray with my topic, so this week’s process was deciding music choice. I was struggling to find the specific movement I wanted to use to depict my topic, and after a struggle of an entire class period, I then decided to hold off on finding music, and wait for it to come to me. This aided me in focusing on the movement itself, and having the choreography stand on itself rather than in association with composition. On Thursday was when I met with my dancers, and I started with explaining the topic. My goal for my project was to create an ideational piece inspired on the connectivity between criminological theories and choreography. I wanted to focus on the idea of recidivism, which is a habitual relapse in crime and the concept of repeat offending. To portray this, I knew I wanted to depict this idea that societal factors and failure, such as unemployment, are what forces these criminals back into the incarceration system, where they feel more safe-haven I jail rather than “free”, however I struggled to depict how. I was blocked for a while, and took the whole weekend to define this depiction, but still struggled to decide how to portray this concept visually. This week was again, a research and explorative week, though those are the most important moments within the creation process.

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Week 5: May 1st and 3rd

This week was the complete showings of our midterm projects, and I could not be more content with what I showed. Due to time constraints, I focused on slow and still movements in contrast with the overly emotional song, in addition to the dynamic change of small areas with rapid movements. I was extremely happy with my movement came out, and since my process was creating on Rogelio, it matched his dancing well, while also stretching himself out of his comfort zone with the nonchalant-ness. I entitled my piece “new moon”, something that I thought of after looking back at an essay I wrote for a science class in high school that was about the moon. The phase “new moon” is the point where the sun and moon are on the same elliptic longitude, within the first lunar phase, thus the moon appears invisible behind the sun. This was the perfect title to depict the overall image and meaning I was hoping to portray.

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Week 4: April 24th and 26th

This week was crunch time, of adding the final touches to our projects in preparation for next week’s final showings. As I was choreographing, I was beginning to get stuck and blocked within the overall vision of my piece. My process was to create on Rogelio himself, and for some reason I felt as though I was not articulating the image clear enough. After the frustration of Tuesday, I was watching the video and had the realization of what was missing: the feeling of being confined. I was asking Rogelio to feel confined and overwhelmed with loneliness and anxiety, however he was going to be performing it in a massive studio. I then decided that the small area in the loft was the best place to depict my midterm project, as it was enclosed within three walls, but also the audience while watching could get this feeling of looking in on him, watch was hoping to make Rogelio feel even more anxious.

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Week 3: April 17th and 19th

This week was an intense week for my journey in this class, as I learned Rogelio’s movement, developed my own choreography, and performed both in the works-in-progress showing. Through this week, my research had finally hit a pivotal movement where I found a base for my aesthetic. As the ideational component of my project centers around the concept of feeling invisible and unheard, I felt like incorporating motifs of sign language into my choreography was the most appropriate and effective method to show this concept. I choreographed the chorus first to show for the showing, and developed a series of signs that utilized subtext of words such as “invisible, behind, hide, lost, lonely, alone” while the lyrics were mentioning other phrases that were around the same depiction of feelings. This breakthrough aided me into discovering the overall vision and meaning that I was seeking to depict into my choreography.

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Week 2: April 10th and 12th

This week was the initial phases of creating our mid-term projects. Due to time constraints, Rogelio and I thus opted to work individually to begin exploring and choreographing on our own this week. During this time was when I further defined what I was looking to investigate in my project. After listening to the “Dear Evan Hansen” soundtrack, not even to explore music choices for this project, I had this light-bulb effect where I realized that I wanted to explore minimalistic-esque and rapid movements with the contrast of an overly emotional song. My goal in creating this was to demonstrate how emotion can be portrayed in the most nonchalant methods, rather than the frequent over-dramatized performances. During the choreographic stage however, I was struggling to find the specific movement aesthetic to match my concept, and this was the week of creative exploration of mostly movements that did not articulate exactly what I was imagining. The majority of this week was an experiment, and unfortunately most of the movement I explored I did not keep. However, even though this week did not produce any material, it was a significant moment in my research for exploring the movement quality I was seeking.

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Week 1: April 3rd and 5th

This week, the most enlightening tools and activities to help me with my research for my mid-term project were the improvisational exercises. The first task was where we created a word to define our concept, and then branched off with various words and prompted a dancer with these phrases. After shifting partners three times, I was able to realize that my idea needed to be extremely narrow, rather than a broad, abstract prompt. The second task was creating the improvisational score, where I promoted the class with choice tasks to reinforce a specific movement aesthetic I was looking for. The first improvisational tasks demonstrated that my concepts and key words in mind for my project were far too broad. Some dancers were given the prompts of “quirky, still, and care-free” which were far too across the board, and the dancers struggled to maintain each point of the prompt within their movement. The second improvisational task, the score, was a ground-breaking discovery and it was enlightening to see my aesthetic that I am searching for in my piece come to life. Being able to address what prompts were successful, and what were more subpar, was beneficial to the initial stages of my research and beginning to explore the choreographic aesthetic I want to create with.

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This is the fifth video clip from my midterm project with Alexis on Forsythe’s “dissected body technique”.

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This is the fourth video clip from my midterm project with Alexis on Forsythe’s “dissected body technique”.

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This is the third video clip from my midterm project with Alexis on Forsythe’s “dissected body technique”.

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This is the second video clip from my midterm project with Alexis on Forsythe’s “dissected body technique”.

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This is the first video clip from my midterm project with Alexis on Forsythe’s “dissected body technique”. 

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The comedic variation of our solos from Week 5. 

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This is the video from Week 1, where my group combined with another group two form a phrase that would eventually be combined to put into the Water Project.