Site Specific Project

I created this work in the choreography class of Fall 2014. For this project, we had to find a location on campus and create a dance phrase of one to two minutes, in which the movement strongly correlates with the geography. Music was not used in the project and this made the choreographic process interesting because the atmosphere changed each day. I chose a bridge as my site which presented its own challenges. With people walking by, cars driving in the background, and ducks quacking, they unintentionally became part of my choreography. Throughout the creative process, I used many compositional devices and choreographic tools to create a cohesive dance. Using Rudolf Laban’s Basic Efforts as guidelines helped me focus on the actions of pressing, slashing, flicking, gliding, and wringing. I found the compositional devices to be the most useful in this project in which we needed to use a minimum of six devices out of the ten we learned. I chose to focus on using repetition, acceleration/deceleration, accumulation, retrograde, active stillness, and dynamic variation. Not having music and using the different efforts and devices was a new method of creating dance for me. I discovered new potential for movement invention because I was not tied to music. Overall, I learned how important movement is by itself because people are given the freedom to interpret the dance without the help of music to give them the story