Six Feet to the Right: Reflection

The end product of this study was a comment on the magnitude of the difference of equality you have with the person sitting "Six Feet to the Right" of you. Amanda sat at the top of the bench giving her more room between her and the floor. The closest to heaven. The audience can see she is a white female in America. While women in America still have issues with equality (especially in the work place), it would not be bad to be a white girl in the States. Shannon sat in the middle of the bench slouched against the wall using no muscle whatsoever to stay exactly where she is. She represents the middle class pretty girl. The mid-class girl-next door can walk out in public with her head held high and yet she has done nothing to be so proud. She sits effortlessly on her chair to receive the men, money, and comfort that come to her, often in that order. She does not worry about being hated for her skin color, sexual orientation, upbringing...etc. She is at the top of the middle class food chain. I represent myself....and every other so called "minority" that has been labeled and tagged. I sit on the edge of my seat. Stable in my stillness and ready to get up and march at any second; ready to stand up for not only the LGBT community, but for everyone who has been given a name for which they are punished even slightly. Equality cannot be only for two or three types of people it has to be for everyone. All people should have a spot on the bench and every person should have respect for the person sitting Six Feet to the Right.

My process for this study was simple and similar to how I come up with movement for everything. The big difference here was that I decided to put the movement first without having a clear choice in concept. I put myself in my dancer's position and waited for the first impulse. When the impulse takes me the next step flows from it and becomes the second step. This continues in a fluid way yielding a brief but solid outline for what could be this dance. Once I had the skeleton I asked Amanda to learn the movement and show me. Seeing her body doing my movement made me take certain things other directions. I wanted to make Amanda look good and yet stay true to the original impulse. So we went back and forth. I put myself in the situation, then placed Amanda in it to repeat what I felt would be the next steps. In this pattern I got about 45 seconds of choreography done. I decided to break from the movement and try to find the music and text that would inspire meaningful changes and an ending to make the dance whole.

I found it difficult to select music for this piece because I like almost all minimalist music. I loved Steve Reich's marimba pieces, and I loved Brian Eno's ambient music and so it became a battle between these two composers. I initially chose Brien Eno's "Music for Airports"

This song fit the quality of my movement and could be easily manipulated by whatever text I chose afterward.

The text was even more difficult but for a very different reason. I did want to use spoken word poetry but it was important to me that it did not sound like verse or song. I feel like "sing-song" poetry can get a bit cliche and make a choreographer seem like he/she is trying too hard to be an artist. So I started with a recommendation from a friend. Buddy Wakefield is an AMAZING spoken word poet who has an emotionally evocative piece called "Hurling Crow Birds and Mocking Bars" that is about forgiveness. Forgiveness is a word that resonates deep inside of me and this poem literally put me in tears. Instantly I said yes to this poem and began to try to find a section of it to use, but as I listened I noticed that it just did not make sense unless it was a whole.



So the search reluctantly began again. I thought about forgiveness and what it meant to me personally. I started thinking about what grudges I was holding onto. What was I angry about? Equality. From the beginning of my adult life as an "out-gay" man I have been perceived as different and sometimes lesser than others. There were these expectations then put on me especially as a dancer to be overtly feminine and submissive. I vigorously beg the question, Am I not a man because I choose to love another man? Why is it that in my creation something was perceived to go wrong? No nothing is wrong with me, I just like guys. And so it became incredibly clear to me that I need to address equality in the context that fits me best. I listened to speakers at rallies and marches to finally discover Staceyann Chin. She is a beautiful woman with this gorgeous afro hair that shakes when she talks because she means business. After listening to her public speeches I stumbled across her piece on Equality and our March.


She has this fire inside of her that spoke to me. I knew no matter what section I chose, her message would be easily perceived. The problem was now with the music. Music for Airports just does NOT have the drive that Staceyann possesses. So I went back to Steve Reich and discovered his Clapping Music from 1972. This song behind the text was absolutely perfect for my piece which had just now become about equality. With the addition of the music came the clear dynamics of the movement, and it just made so much sense to have all three of us on the bench at the same time which gave birth to the title "Six Feet to the Right".



I decided to have my audience standing on the opposite bench simply because of the angle. I believe a dance should be aesthetically striking no matter what the concept, and the upward angle showed more of the movement's dimensions.

I was really inspired by the section on "Improvisation and Exploration" in the Dance Composition text. I feel very comfortable in this way of creating because there is so much freedom given as to what can happen and why it is happening. "It is difficult to say exactly when the process of exploration becomes improvisation because exploration of an idea or range of movements is often effected through improvisation to examine the potential, to try out and feel practically, what is right." (Page 80). I have been using this process in each study without knowing it. It is perfect for me because I like to jump into the studio and create on impulse. In this way I feel that I am always being true to myself even as I change day to day. I come in to the studio with a blank slate and through the cocktail of exploration and improvisation, the dance flows forth in stages. First it is a skeleton, second it is a shadow, third it becomes meaty, and in time it develops this meaningful wholeness that is set, and yet has room to grow, breath, and expand to become whatever is true for the current day.

"Interrelationships" discussed on page 106 in Dance Composition directly describes the kind of relationship I wanted to be held by this trio. There is no way for there to be a relationship between the dancers in a direct way as only one dancer is moving at one time. I used intense focus and proximity as a way of making Amanda and Shannon address each other and then Me. Interrelationships are described as, "alternative chance relationships between the number of dancers as solos, duos, trios, and so on." So by placing the dancers in a row, I created these interrelationships. Amanda slid slowly down into the pigeon lunge as she gazed forward at Shannon, and then Shannon did the same to me. Amanda slid slowly down the bench touching her head to Shannon's leg as Shannon did the same to me. I feel that these interactions between us created the sense of community that is conducive to my concept of equality.

Noisy Fixation: Reflection Blog

Noisy Fixation was inspired by the poem "Silence" by Bradley Hathaway; a spiritual poet and performance artist with a gentle yet effective voice.



Upon starting the composition process, Audrey and I discussed what we enjoyed in terms of music, poetry, and gestures. We both enjoy duets, trios, quartets and other small groupings of instruments as opposed to solos. It was important to us both to have a poem that was substantial and passionate but not cheesy or melodramatic. When we discussed what we liked and what we would like to see for this piece we found a poem then divided to search for the other materials. We both found music options, gestures from the poem, and general ideas for where we thought the piece should go.
We reconvened the next day to show what we had gathered and decide what to keep and what to scrap. I had brought a beautiful song Opus 35 No. 22 in B Minor composed by Fernando Sors even though it is a song for the solo guitar. This was not something either of us anticipated wanting, but we both felt that the emotions evoked by the song matched and complimented those evoked by Hathaway's poem. There is a sense of longing and nostalgia to the song set by the minor notes and chords  and the running strums. It struck me as sensual and something tragically and sometimes painfully beautiful. I feel that there could be very few songs that would have worked better for this piece than Sors Opus 35.

Creating movement for the piece was interesting because I have never approached a project in this way before. Audrey and I both came into the studio and discussed the words of the poem and  listened to the music. We then split and created short ten second phrases that we later showed to each other and discussed what we would do with them. I also had the idea of starting the dance skin to skin so using that idea, we started the dance with a few gestures from the phrase I had created. Upon creating the first minute of the dance we were given notes from Prof. Leanhardt that the spacial design of the dance was severely lacking. To fix this, we decided that every pathway we had thought about would need to be exaggerated and intentional. When I watched the video of our performance I felt that this problem was patched fairly well. Had we more time to practice, I would create more complex spacial patterns as we almost always stuck to diagonals.

Audrey had created a phrase that we decided to vary in speed between the two of us. I did one set of the movement in the time that she took to do three or four sets as she made a jagged angular shape around me. She finished by jabbing me in the side and I fall away and return to her as she leans back on my chest. This was to represent the relationship between us as one listens and the other laments. Sometimes we even hurt the people who listen to us and help us, but somehow they come back to support us anyways. This could be anyone, it does not have to mean God or Jesus or any other deity.

We decided to then locomote the phrase I had created and put it in a basic cannon. We traveled the first half to the upstage right corner and when we reached the resting position there, I became the on leading the cannon to the downstage left corner where we finally find complete rest.

Overall with the time restrictions and all the juxtaposition of the schedule with all of our classes, I feel like Audrey and I had about a majority success. The other students seemed to enjoy watching it, and many of them mentioned that they found a narrative quality to it even if the story they found was not one that I wanted them to see. The things I would change about our piece are: spacial design complexity, more abstraction of gestures, a high energy climax, and a longer stillness when i curl up on Audrey's back. I feel that these aspects of the dance greatly influence the relationship between Audrey and I. The most influential change would be the abstraction of gestures. I feel that this would get us away from the undesired romantic narrative quality.

In the Dance Composition text there is a very relevant section on Auditory Stimuli. In the section it talks about how the music can create a frame work for the dance. Like when a building is in the primary stages of progress and all that stands is the wood frame. It can dictate so many things if a composer should choose to submit to it. Style, length, mood, and phrasing are just a few examples of the structural qualities music brings to the piece. These four aspects were definitely present in the composition of Noisy Fixation. The style of the dance was smooth, the mood was nostalgic and hopeful, the phrasing was continuous with a sparse accents and moments of stillness and silence, and finally the length was perfection as it was a two minute section of Opus 35 with a clear resolution.

I was very glad to find the section on Visual Design. For some reason I could not find the proper words to describe what I was enjoying about certain pieces of work. I kept trying to say that the design aspect of the dance was really nice and people did not know what I meant. It made sense to me because many of my friends have graduated from the Communications Design program and for them "design" means the way something physically looks. They design an ad for Starbucks and what you see on the paper is a design like a picture or a pose. I was trying to tell people that I liked the pictures created by their dance the way it physically LOOKED without complete reference to the concept. This does not always mean that the piece was movement for the sake of movement or that it lacks concept, it just means that the separate aspect of the visual design was pleasing all on its own. This section of the Dance Composition text really helped me understand what it was that I was trying to explain.

I did not have an inspirational dance piece for this study, however I was inspired by the voice of Bradley Hathaway when he performs "Silence" live. I had the pleasure of seeing him perform in a very intimate theatre space. His voice dances. It rises and falls in tone and inflection as he feels what he is saying. It's like the words are coming not from his throat but from some place deep in his diaphragm or lower even. As the words emerge his face lights up with the energy that came up with the words and his focus is searching yet intentional. He is so powerful and yet so gentle. It was important for me to show these qualities in this piece.