Mé Féin

The background to this research is based off my own journey from Ireland to America. Also, it is about my personal journey and experience of a transitional period of my life. I come from a University in Ireland that was primarily based in minimalistic ideas and experimentalism. It was a multidisciplinary education that encouraged personal artistic development. The work I created was based off of the self-reflective process of a personal life journey. I was inspired by my favorite poem by Robert Frost, The Road not taken. The premise of this poem deals with the process of decision making. Frost, reveals through his work, how one can learn to be content with the choices that they make. The metaphorical journey found within the poem connected with me on a personal level for it reflected my own experience. I used a previous movement study I had created and extracted gestures from it. These movements, I felt, connected on many levels with the words of the poem. Breath initiation was the underlying support that motivated the journey and the dancer’s experience. Initially, I started with recorded traditional Irish music, and after a while, I realized that the journey was not complete unless I played my bagpipes. Without the live performance, I felt personally disconnected to the work. Furthermore, once I got into production, I realized the essentiality of my presence on stage with the dancers. My physical presence on stage was the final piece that ultimately completed my self-reflective journey. Each dancer transcended within the journey as an individual, and as a member of the larger group. I desired for my work to be focused on the personal embodiment of movement rather than the physical approach of making shapes and lines. That minimalistic movement, through a series of gestures, allowed each individual to transcend through a simplistic form. Minimalistic movements are essential to what makes us human and it has the unique ability to transcend the body, mind, and spirit. The Minimalistic approach to dance is critical for artistic exploration because of the limitless possibilities it possesses