The “Moving Space” project consisted of picking an allotted location in Sullivant Hall and integrating movement into it in order to highlight the structure.
After considering various places, my group decided to choose the cartoon library stairs as our space. Often something as simple as stairs are taken for granted. We walk on them everyday to get to and from classes and yet they are marvelous and complex works of architecture. Each step provides for a new stage for us to work with. When choreographing the piece, we focused on simplicity, making the actual staircase the main focal point rather then complex dance moves. We had each dancer pick a stair to sit on and shuffled our movements to illustrate the different planes of the stairs, moving up and down, right and left, and moving to a completely new stair. To reflect this simplistic movement, I created a soundtrack for our piece that consisted of slow simple beats that gradually accelerated as our movements got faster and more complex. Then as we slowed our movement towards the end of the piece, the music reflected this by slowing back down to the original beat.
While choreographing our piece, we found that the stairs were a high traffic zone in Sullivant, and at times it was hard to do our choreography without getting in the pedestrians’ ways. Instead of trying to do our choreography when no one was around, we decided to embrace the crowds of people and make our dance into a makeshift social experiment.
We picked an incredibly high traffic time to record our dance, knowing that anything could happen when people started flowing in. Suddenly, the pedestrians became a key part of our choreography, for we had to make quick choices based on what they did. This is when our artistry really kicked in. We had to consistently be aware of the pedestrians and the space around us, making choices as what to do next based on the space around us. In the video this can be seen when we paused with active stillness to let a group of students pass by, or when Kailee decided not to change her back and forth position despite the very angry pedestrian who was trying to get by her. I personally enjoy that Kailee made this decision, for it added an element of comedy to our dance. In addition, the pedestrians had to make choices when reacting to us being in the way of their travel path. Some pedestrians decided to avoid the situation by just not going up the stairs, others started to walk up the stairs then stopped when they found us to be in their way, and others just simply attempted to jump over us because they were late to class. Altogether, creating this dance was a very interesting and creative process as it took in multiple elements to create one complete work.
Kelsey Kempner 