Ohio State Projects – Marissa Thomas

Arts & Community Research

I recently presented my community research project on the University Circle Neighborhood in Cleveland, OH at the May Environmental Professionals Network event. For the past few months, I have been researching this community’s assets and power structure as part of my Asset Based Community Development Class. I focused on studying the arts and cultural programming in the area and how that community asset has led to neighborhood growth and development. I really loved the opportunity to combine my passions of arts and community development through this project and further validate why arts are so important to the growth and sustainability of a community.

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Autobiography – Compositional Study

I was born in Las Vegas, Nevada, and what I remember the most is the physical environment. It is a beautiful place encircled by mountains with blue skies and red rocks. Though I was young and Las Vegas mostly lives in my memory, I still remember the richness of the land. I feel that my love for nature and the environment grew from being surrounded by and living in such a beautiful physical environment. Growing up, I remember playing in the dirt in my grandmother’s backyard for hours and loved learning about the plants and wildlife native to the valley. Trips to the nature center or one of the many state park were very memorable events for me. My value of the environment came out of the physical space that I was in, and this value still shapes who I am today. My favorite places always seem to be related to nature. I see myself outside, surrounding by the sky and the surrounding environment. I believe that this place attachment forms a large part of my identity and gives reason to why my Autobiography study is centered around those memories.

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Artistic and Creative Endeavor STEP Signature Project

For my Artistic and Creative Endeavor STEP Signature Project, I attended the 2018 International Associations of Blacks in Dance (IABD) Conference in Los Angeles, California. At this conference, I took various workshop classes with companies and artists I admire, I increased my technical skill and artistry by learning renowned artists, I forged connections with artists in the black dance community, and I researched and auditioned for companies that I am interested in dancing for.

One thing that I have always struggled with the complexity of my identity. As a biracial female, for much of my life I have wondered about my own blackness and my fit into the black dance community. Being able to attend a conference that celebrated an enforced my identity as a black artist was transformational. I felt encouraged to engage and share; create and absorb; and most importantly, to enjoy being black. This project has also given me insight to my future career as a performer. I was able to see options that I have – companies and artists that I would love to work with and who are looking to work with me. My view of myself and of my future has definitely transformed through my STEP Signature Project, and I feel inspired to see where dance takes me in the coming years. Continue reading Artistic and Creative Endeavor STEP Signature Project

Documentary – “the sun will rise”

This project of creating my short documentary was a level up from the last project of making my dance film with the goal to gather some information and share it via film. Finding my topic and obtaining the information was the easier portion of the project; tattoos are such an interesting topic to me and immediately came to me as my topic idea. Then all it took was a little searching and asking around to find someone to be the subject of my film. I thought of a few questions and filmed an interview with my person.

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Dance for Camera – “a second third”

We are working with dance in a new medium in freshman seminar – film – and with that comes the freedom of creating works that cannot be performed on a regular stage in real time. In my dance film, a second third, I played with tempo and speed of movement to create an illusion of dancer Hazel Black moving at a normal speed while her background has seemed to be moving at extreme speed.

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Production – Foley Final

Working as a team in Group X, our goal was to create a live Foley orchestration to a 3-minute clip from “Wallace and Gromit”.

This final production project was definitely an interesting way to combine all of the topics we have learned this semester into one collective assignment. While the project was mainly focused on the production of Foley, we still had to focus and incorporate costuming, lighting, and music. I was one of the Foley artists in charge of producing the sounds of the penguin’s footsteps and the tape measure. Our group was known to have more realistic Foley sounds, and that is mostly because the items we used to produce those sounds were parallel to the items we saw in the clip; for example, using actual tape measures and cutting cardboard with a pocketknife. We had the thought that they would provide the most genuine sounds. Our group was very dissatisfied and surprised to find that the actual audio of the clip sounded dissimilar to the sounds we produced. We also found that there were sounds that our group added that were not even present in the actual clip; for example, the alarm clock and blinking. From this project, I have gained a greater understanding of the background work to create what we see on screen – I will never be able to see films in the same way.

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Moving Space – Stairwork

My Moving Space project, titled Stairwork, is a collaborative dance installation residing on the stairwell of the rotunda in Sullivant Hall created by Hazel Black, Lisa D’Onofrio, Grace Robinson, Brianna Rhodes, and myself. This location, upon of first learning about the project, was one of the first that came to mind of wanting to choreograph into the space. Oddly enough, that was what most of my group members had admitted to as well, therefore it was easy to come to a unanimous decision on the location. I believe that the stairwell appealed so much to me because there are various planes for movement to be performed on. Compared to a typical place where dances are performed – otherwise known as a stage – the stair well allowed us to use the landing, each step, and even the railings as platforms for our movement. The stairwell was also a great structure to draw inspiration for movement. For example, traffic on a stairwell typically flows from the top to the bottom or from the bottom to the top and our piece demonstrated that by dancers coming into the space from the top steps and exiting at the bottom. Inspiration was also taken from the architecture of the stairwell: there were many geometrical patterns seen in the stairs, the landing, and railings, and that translated into many shapes and patterns that can be seen in the movement.
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Learning & Creating with GarageBand

As a solid PC user, I have had very little experience with Mac’s software and its applications. I believe that the closet that I have ever gotten to using GarageBand is watching my peers in the sixth grade play around and make beats in class instead of doing the required assignment. I remember being fascinated by the ability to make numerous, unique songs from one beat, and I also remember being entirely confused in the process of making them. Upon learning that we would be getting an introduction to the GarageBand application in freshman seminar, I had mixed feelings of excitement and of nervousness. Finally, I would be able to have a chance at something I have only ever admired, yet I was also afraid that I would be extremely untalented at it.

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