The Senior Thesis Dance Concert, always a highlight of the campus’s spring arts lineup, is anticipated, eclectic, and sometimes a bit mysterious—audience members may find themselves exiting the the¬ater blown away by the spectacle but a little unsure of what it all means. By email and phone, senior choreog¬raphers Annie Perretta, Evelyn Israel, and Jess Brownfeld (compositions by Indee Mitchell, Kimberly Denson, and Julie Lam are also featured in the show) explained their processes, the ideas behind their compositions, and their plans for future involvement in dance.

Argus: If this doesn’t spoil any¬thing, can you tell us a bit about your piece? Did you have a particular style in mind? Where did the initial con¬cept come from?

Annie Perretta: I am writing my senior essay on a group of dancers from the 1930’s, who called them¬selves the Workers Dance League. When I initially started, my idea was to create a dance that highlighted the idea of what it means to work in a collective group of artists. How can you portray ideas of community through movement?

Evelyn Israel: Well first of all I started out in Intro to Dance dur¬ing the first semester of my freshman year, so I’m interested in movement that comes from people without a technical background, and that’s a place that inspiration comes from. Many of my dancers have no techni¬cal background. This year I’m doing a project attempting to explore how racism can be confronted through movement and dialogue, and my piece is a part of this project.

A: What’s your choreographing process like?

Jess Brownfeld: When I choreo¬graph, I always collaborate with my dancers. It is very important to me that the choreography of the piece be dependant on the unique danc¬ers that I have; if one dancer was different the piece would be entirely changed. Usually I lead my dancers in activities that allow them to create their own movement. Then we show the movement they’ve created and I arrange and sculpt the movement to form the piece.

AP: My process is really collab¬orative. I like to bring in a lot of my own choreography and teach it to my dancers. But a huge portion of the piece is from movement that they came up with themselves that I then piece together. I really tried to high¬light my dancers as individuals as well as a collective, so I wanted their own styles as movers to shine through.

EI: Most of the movement vo¬cabulary is created by my dancers through exercises that I give them. We did some creation from specific text about the topic and from other movement exercises I would give them, so they created pretty much all the movement vocabulary. All the dancers are choreographers. As chore¬ographer I consider myself more like a director or editor, thinking about the order and how stuff happens.

A: How did the piece evolve as you rehearsed with the dancers?

AP: I really didn’t know what kind of dance I was going to end up with when I started choreographing. At first I thought my piece was go¬ing to be soft, airy and calm, but it turned out to be very much the op¬posite.

A: What’s it like to be in a show that also features pieces by other choreographers? Did you collaborate during rehearsals? How do you deter¬mine how pieces will fit together?

JB: It is interesting because the concert ends up being quite eclectic because all the choreographers have different ideas and goals in mind. We do not collaborate in rehearsal, nor do we decide how the pieces will fit together.

AP: It’s great to have a piece in a show with so many choreographers. We all have such different styles and want our dances to accomplish very different things – some dances are personal, some are political. The concert ended up being very dynamic and eclectic. We don’t collaborate that much when it comes to rehears¬als. We had one showing with each other and the dance faculty to get constructive criticism, but beyond that, we pretty much only focus on our own pieces.

EI: It’s definitely a challenge in some ways, but also exciting to have my work showcased with other dance majors who I feel connected to and whom I want to support. I also love that it brings in a community of dif¬ferent people coming together. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out the order and if nothing brilliant comes to us we just think about the dancers—who’s in multiple pieces and might need time between, etc.

A: The title of the show is “Shifting Rifts.” What does this mean in terms of your composition?

AP: My dance focuses on mov¬ing in and out of unison and individ¬ual movement, so the group dynamic shifts a lot throughout the piece. The dance relates to the title more in a physical sense.

EI: For me I think it’s about shaking things up…recognizing dif¬ferent perspectives from the ways that we perceive things.

A: Since this is your senior the¬sis, what do you hope to do with dance in the future?

JB: This piece is in conjunc¬tion with a full-length written thesis about using dance in public elemen¬tary schools to teach core subjects, i.e., English, math, science, and social studies. For example, dance can be used to teach sequencing and pattern¬ing which are skills that are necessary to learn mathematics. In the future I hope to teach dance or creative move¬ment, or work in event coordinating of the performing arts.

AP: It’s amazing how many choreographic opportunities are at Wesleyan. I am not sure when I will have another opportunity to choreo¬graph once I leave, but I plan on con¬tinuing dancing after college. I also have an administrative internship for a dance company for the summer.

EI: I’m definitely interested in teaching creative movement to kids and maybe other ages too. And this has also been a project supporting some of my larger life ambitions of understanding more and more ways that movement and dialogues can be used to create social change.

A: Is there anything else you’d like people to know about the show or your piece?

JB: Very much of this piece is improvisation. Together with my dancers I developed multiple struc¬tures and the dancers sense within the group when it is time to move between them.

EI: I think I’d like to say that if people see my piece and read this ar¬ticle, it would be great if they could email me their responses to the piece, because part of my project is seeing what my work makes them think or doesn’t make them think—I’m inter¬ested in all responses.