Condensed Skies: The Joining of Opposing Forces through Imaginitive Movement Making

My Senior Dance Project, Condensed Skies, represents both the culminating experience of my collegiate work and my first experience of choreographing on such a scale. During this process I found myself faced with the task of deciding what was most important to me regarding meaning-making through movement. I discovered that engaging, and drawing out, the power of imagination in my dancers and the audience became the common thread that ran through the ideas that I explored. An awareness of the perspective shifting power of the imagination led to the emergence of subsequent values that were crucial to my Project, and seemed to hang between paradoxes. This thesis will show how these values—particularly modes of experiencing and describing art that are commonly viewed as opposing—may be seen, as exemplified in my Project, as overlapping. I will specifically explore the unity of various artistic mediums with a special emphasis on text and dancing, as well as connections between post-modern and classical thought and their manifestations