Myself Reappeared

Publication Date

Fall 11-2024

College

College of Music & Performing Arts

Department

Theatre and Dance, Department of

Student Level

Undergraduate

SPARK Category

Art

Faculty Advisor

Debbie Belue

Metadata/Fulltext

Metadata ONLY

SPARK Session

Dance Composition, Debbie Belue

Presentation Type

Performance

Summary

My intentions while choreographing my piece “Myself Reappeared” were mainly to utilize many of the ideas we had talked about in class and marry them with my own style and story. This process was much different than how I might normally approach choreographing a piece; however, my intentions were to try something new and challenge myself and the expectations I had at the beginning of this semester. My intention for the choreography on a technique and movement aspect mainly came from taking elements from the 16 manipulations of a motif, such as repetition, phrasing, form, dynamics, and staging to make a cohesive piece. From the story standpoint, my choreographic intention was to communicate the emotion of my journey of recovery (my “spine”) rather than trying to make the audience completely understand the details of my story. During my creation of the dance, my primary concern was communicating this idea of doing and undoing when trying to make changes. Rather than trying to incorporate all of the elements of my journey such as struggling with body image or self-harm, I wanted to make it less literal and develop what I felt was more important. Therefore, a lot of my movement was not miming the physical elements of what could have communicated an eating disorder, but rather it was movement that I felt communicated the inner workings of my mind and heart posture. I also adapted my original idea of being painted black to dancing with a black strip of fabric wrapped around me.I decided on the form of repetition of six phrases but with slight changes each time because it represented the non-linear path I took in recovery. Changing habits or elements of your life that are so ingrained in your being is a gradual process and often can feel like no progress is being made. This idea was best communicated by returning to the beginning and having to repeat the same movements to get to standing and get back up. We also live in very cyclical patterns which can seem monotonous and maddening which I felt was shown by the many times that I had to repeat the choreography to try and move.

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