Tag: project

Virtually touring Morgan Walker’s “inside Outsider”

Since October 2020, I have been working with my dear friend, Morgan Walker, in her newest choreographic project “inside Outsider” as a dancer and collaborator. “inside Outsider” is a work that is inspired by the complexities of mental health impacts due to sheltering in place, social distancing, and isolation. Despite the pandemic, this project has toured to multiple virtual festivals – Mark DeGarmo Virtual International Arts Festival (VIA), Trifecta Dance Festival, and the 2021 CDCFest. I am incredibly proud of Morgan and so gracious to her for including me in this work. I am excited to see the future iterations of this piece and its continuation!

Rehearsal shots by Liz Cooper (@theballetexperiment)

Performance shots from CDCfest by Sorcha Augustine

Expression through Intermedia

Intermedia is information {comma} expression {comma} building.

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Reflecting back on my first lab, I feel that I was very stunned by the ability to create and the tools at my fingertips. I had never worked in the medium before and was not very knowledgeable about what it necessarily was. I had seen a few Intermedia performances from students in department and was completely amazed by the ability to create a fully dimensional and immersive performance and by the many composition possibilities. I do not consider myself a choreographer – I find it so hard to express ideas through movement and adding infinite layers of possibility through multimedia seemed overwhelming. However, I was intrigued by this course, and I am very excited to learn how to create in different ways this semester. There is interest in seeing what I am able to do when bringing in aspects of digital technology and visual media to dance composition and seeing what channel opens for expression. Already, I have seen exponential growth with my knowledge in use of technology and artistry in correlation. Continue reading Expression through Intermedia

Opposite Tendencies – Compositional Study

After weeks of creating studies in comp class, a trend becomes apparent in everyone’s movement – natural tendencies that seem comfortable to a dancer and that appear frequently in the work that they create. In examining my own movement and previous studies, I found that there are definitely things that I do that have just become synonymous with my movement style. For example of a few, my ballet background shows most obviously with my contemporary ballet style of movement; I seem to put a lot of focus onto my feet; and my head often has an upward tilt, giving myself a higher-than-eye-level focus.

My final comp study took these natural tendencies and use them to create different movement. This was later paired with my partner, Paige St. John’s work to create a duet of opposing tendencies.

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.

Continue reading Documentary – “the sun will rise”

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.

Continue reading Dance for Camera – “a second third”

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.

Continue reading Production – Foley Final

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.
Continue reading Moving Space – Stairwork

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.

Continue reading Learning & Creating with GarageBand