Senior Project Descriptions
Olivia Buckhorn
A new choreographic work by Olivia Buckhorn will consist of a group of dancers who will interact with each other and with a physical structure designed and built in collaboration with Jon Charette ’24. The piece will be crafted with the intention of exploring the dialogue between the dancers and the physical structure. By manipulating and changing the structure, this work will investigate how we initiate and experience change in life. The primary movement vocabulary will be contemporary and modern dance.
Mei Geller
This work will be a convergence of my studies in anthropology and dance. Inspired by museum gallery spaces, the project will explore the relationships between museums and dance, focusing on the human form and its role in dance, visual art, and space.
Set in a custom-built museum gallery, this project will blur the lines between dancers’ bodies and works of visual art. Dancers will become statues and turn back again, fall into paintings and reemerge, shifting between themselves and the artworks. Both playful and introspective, I aim to use experiences of art as a framework to explore my own complicated relationship with control over my body.
This piece will consider three relationships between museums and dance:
- How people physically move through a gallery space, what entering a gallery means, and why there are choreographed codes of movement in that space. This stems from discourse on exhibit design within museum studies, and the practice of site-specific dance and pedestrian movement exploration.
- How people and human bodies are depicted in art, and the relationship created between the person observing and the person depicted through the choices of the artist. There is a duet first between the artist and the subject, and then between the subject and the observer. Through this concept, the piece will explore relationship dynamics, identity, and agency over perception.
- How dance turns the physical body into an object/artifact to be observed rather than something in/with which to live. Dance can be a tool of self-expression but also an avenue for others to express themselves through dancers. Dancers can find freedom through movement yet are confined by the way their body looks as it moves. This replicates the relationship between the object in the glass case and the museum visitor, or the masterpiece and the crowd.
Ive Jones
In an original choreographic composition by Ive Jones, 6 performers invite you to probe ideas of self, community, and culture against the backdrop of growing consumer interests and political regimes. This untitled work will uplift Hip-hop diasporic forms, having been birthed in the United States and permuting across the globe. Premiering at the Hearst in February 2024, Jones aims to lay bare both the rigor and diversity of Hip-hop diasporic dance as well as what it means to experience joy in a medium born out of widespread adversity.
Isabel Kingston
A new work by Isabel Kingston will explore themes of loneliness, loss, and the sometimes excruciating difficulty of finding community in young adulthood. This somewhat sobering movement-based exposé will be paired with a look into the healing and restoration that occurs as one becomes comfortable in one’s own skin and learns to accept help and compassion from others. These concepts will not be so much explicit as threaded subtly into the work. Motifs explored through dance will include the group versus the individual, the notions of giving and receiving as well as the surrendering of the body and mind to a source of peace outside of oneself. The workshopping of tight, intricate formations will seek to communicate the idea of “community” as a living and at times volatile organism. Moments of somber, painstaking unison will be paired with moments of free-flowing and chaotic joy; the music will reflect this paradox as well, including moments of house or high-energy jazz music to complement the sections of sweeping emotional melodies. The style will be a contemporary that is heavy on motif work and athleticism as well as influenced at times by the language of jazz-funk and hip-hop.
Ethan Luk
“In the early 1990s, Andy, a round, jolly, older neighbor who had lived in the Village for over twenty years, put his long playing records, his grandmother’s furniture, dishes, almost everything from his apartment onto the sidewalk under a for sale sign the week before moving to Los Angeles. I asked him how he could part with all of these things, some personal. He told me, ‘These things mean nothing to me. I’ve lost so much more.’ He had lost his boyfriend, and so many of his friends. I had lived in my apartment for about a year at that point, and it was sparsely furnished, so I bought his grandmother’s rocking chair, the seat of which was unraveling from his cat’s scratches, and an old floor lamp which I still have. I picked through some of his recordings of operas, but they were all worn down from repeated playing, the covers scratched by the omnivorous cat. I often think of Andy and wonder where he is now, or if he is. I regret not keeping in contact with him. He haunts me.”
– My funeral and other performances, an email from E.K. to Ethan Luk, Fri, May 21, 2021 at 10:49 PM
This email haunts me often, and I think there is a dance within this email. Some questions:
- The dance within this email is one that involves the transference of objects. A passes something to B. What do our collected objects reveal about us? How do we hold, extend, and uplift the memory of another person within the inanimate?
- How do we show intimacy beyond a romantic context? What are the bodily codes and configurations among friends that communicate what Lora Mathis calls “radical softness”?
- Does queerness involve a project of throwing away in service of creating new homes? Like what Jose Esteban Muñoz said in Cruising Utopia “We must enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in this world. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present.”
- What are the traces a person leaves behind? Can we turn absence into a partner in a dance, in life?
- Does a dance have a trace? Does a life have a trace?
- Can we stretch time through performance to acknowledge and feel the imprint, pressure, and dust of people and their belongings?
Within the gift economy and network of objects, there is a story about reinventing love, care, and remembrance that is emerging. I invite you to join me in creating a movement language that presents and navigates these questions. Let’s take off our shoes at the door and build a home.
Chris Park
“Vol. II” (Working Title) explores how our dreams — or aspirations in life — form, develop, and eventually end (in either success or in acceptance in its impossibility). As a chapter of the second decade into the dancers’ lives, this project draws parallels between the uncertainties of making a sequel with those of growing up in one’s 20s. Will the second one be as good as the first? Is this going to be a trilogy or a franchise? Where will the series go next? Through dance, live music, projection, narration, community discussion, and shared meals, Chris Park encourages introspection into what is desired in the moment, in the future, and by the end of what we can imagine our lives to be. With this intention, this project will utilize subversions in conventions for performance, choreographic practices that embrace idiosyncrasies, and various weight-sharing dynamics.
Jasmine Rivers
How can we recognize our bodies as valid sites of knowledge production and bearers of intergenerational embodied knowledge? What does it mean to embody a multiplicity of ancestral legacies? What does it mean to dance contradictory inheritances?
In this new choreographic work, Jasmine Rivers leads a dance-based exploration of the complexities of intergenerational embodied knowledge in multiracial communities. Informed by anthropological scholarship, critical mixed race studies, and Jasmine’s own personal experiences as a multiracial artist, the choreographic process will be highly interdisciplinary and collaborative. The small, affinity space-like cast of 4-5 multiracial identifying dancers will participate in guided somatic meditations, reflective journaling and group discussion, and improvisation-based investigations to generate a shared bank of knowledge that will serve as the foundation for the work. In embodying the conceptual basis of the project, Jasmine’s artistic approach will embrace contradiction and critically anti-dichotomous questioning. As such, the contemporary movement style will be characterized by contrasting dynamics, juxtaposed textures, and exploration of the extremes of stillness and chaos.
Storm Stokes
By utilizing a black studies framework that mobilizes the deconstructed ‘ruins’ of prescriptive, racial molds to reimagine liberatory future existence, Storm Stokes’ Senior Choreographic Independent Project seeks to visually birth the embodiment of a reimagined, black spiritual reality. With a cast of 8 to 10 dancers, Storm will embrace the aforementioned framework in both form and aesthetic by drawing upon the intimacy of dance installation works, an eclectic, contemporary movement vocabulary, the deconstruction of body castings (plaster materials), and video (textual) projection. Interested dancers can expect to participate in intentional, state based movement; to performatively meditate on the objectified body as a site of deconstruction and reimagination; and to enjoy a rigorous and evocative nineteen week process culminating in a full length work performed in Heart Theatre February 29th – March 2nd. This project is graciously supported by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Dance and the 2023 Alex Adam ‘07 Award Fund.
Dany Tajes
This work and process is primarily one of learning and growing. In his own experience as a Gallego-American growing up in Central Jersey and Costa da Morte, and through conversations with extended family and friends, Dany has learned a great deal about the nuances of Galician culture and how it relates to the broader Iberian diaspora. Particularly interested in migration and processes of intercultural contact, Dany invites his cast to question historical events of exchange, fusion, and appropriation, reflecting on their own embodied histories as well as those of their peers. With support from cultural and academic advisors such as Grammy Award-winning gaiteira Cristina Pato, this team will critically reimagine processes of ethical and respectful cultural engagement, particularly through dance and music. Dany will be continuing his own process of learning throughout the coming months, getting more physically involved with Galician cultural centers and learning muiñeira in NY/NJ and A Coruña. Dany also hopes to develop connections and have conversations with representatives from centers in Cuba and Venezuela, countries that have had massive influxes of Gallego migrants, including members of Dany’s own family. Dany trusts that his cast and collaborators will foster a continual passion and excitement for dance and music as embodied cultural artifacts that we can engage with in critical and respectful ways. The final work will primarily center on dance, with supplemental elements to establish context and a full viewing experience: live instrumentation, audio samples, video, images, and written word. Generating this work will entail deep empathetic conversation, movement analysis, and practice with different movement vocabularies to create something new together.
