On the nights of March 27, 28 and 29, the Senior Thesis Dance Concert “Instadance” premiered. The concert featured work by nine senior dance majors, performances in conjunction with semester- and year-long research.
Choreographer Julien Granich-Young’s ’08 piece “Now Boarding (fingerflip out)” was the first performance of the night. At first, a group of six skateboarder-dancers glided on the pavement in a seemingly random fashion, before the music began to boom from the stereo system of a car parked next to the pavilion. Wordlessly, the six began to coordinate their moves in time with one another and to the beat of an eerie hip-hop/electronica mix. The slow, steady beat and the stoic expressions of the dancers even while doing handsprings and difficult tricks made the performance seem like a thrilling “Night of the Living Dead” on wheels.
Dancers for “Current Event(s),” a piece by Stephanie Roer ’08, were already on stage as the audience entered the ’92 Theater after Granich-Young’s first piece of the night. The dancers, each with a roll of tape, constructed a huge rectangular sheet of newspaper made from what looked like pages of The New York Times. They used the newly-constructed sheet as a parachute-plaything until suddenly, all ten dancers disappeared underneath it and closed its edges, transforming the huge newspaper into a wrapping for a massive human dumpling. Throughout Roer’s piece, the newspaper was successively destroyed and reconstituted in different ways, turning from cheerful game-play to grim and chaotic.
“How to Name a Home” by Martha Jane Kaufman ’08 explored the relationships between each of the five women on stage. In a particularly striking gesture, the dancers rapidly combed their hair with their fingers and mimed tying it around their necks and bodies, conveying their anxiety about the self and the body. The piece had many moments of playfulness as well—dancers charmed with expressive faces, and squealed and whooped to each other.
Rebecca Sorell’s ’08 dance was an examination of the ways in which nature is represented in dance. As a Dance and Earth and Environmental Sciences (E&ES) double major, Sorell used a program to turn the geologic data gathered from sediment cores she took in the lab to compose music for the piece, entitled “How to Make a Tube of Mud.”
“The whole thing was based on a research project I did with the E&ES department last summer in a bioluminescent bay,” she said.
Stephanie Fungsang’s ’08 piece “This is just to say” began with a series of human sculptures momentarily lit by spotlights. The dancers moved primarily in duets, experimenting with many variations of their spatial relationship. Fungsang, who both choreographed and danced in the performance, once butted heads with another dancer with a typical wrestling move, drawing laughter from the audience, later sitting on his shoulders and embracing his face as he walked casually across the stage. Throughout the piece, the dancers conveyed a sense of strength, tenderness and affection. It ended with a moving image—a dancer lay on a platform created by the bent backs of two other dancers, reaching down with an outstretched hand toward another in the space underneath her.
The sixth performance of the night, choreographed by Brighid Gannon ’08 and titled “no sweat in second life,” explored the implications of new technology on human lives and bodies, and was enacted against the sound of rhythmic keyboard typing. Some of the driving motifs of the dance were typing fingers and stilted, robotic movements. In one particular instance, a solo dancer’s movements were isolated to single joints in the body, while her fingers fluttered continually. The piece ended with a dancer in a small square of blue light, her head thrown back, either asserting her living presence in the face of computerization, or offering it up as a sacrifice to a technological age.
Rachel Fischhoff’s ’08 “How to Build a New Gravity” incorporated what seemed to be audio of a historical recording of a NASA launch. Many of the dancer’s movements played with momentum and length, structures created by bodies that dissolved, then resolved into geometric shapes and pendulum movements. In one instance, two dancers carefully placed one finger on the ground before falling there, as if to claim that particular point in space for their very own.
“Swallowing an animal cracker,” choreographed by Melanie Cherng ’08, featured six dancers traveling occasionally intersecting paths, each designated by a recognizable sound or gesture. In one humorous moment, all six dancers clustered together and raised their arms, lifting and dropping their hands as they made clucking noises.
Dancers for Kelly Klein’s ’08 “polysexed touchplay” presented the audience with ping-pong sized balls that glowed red and emitted chirping sounds when touched at certain points, inviting the audience to participate. The dancers were accompanied by live piano music, which mixed with the random chirping of the balls as audience members, both intentionally and unintentionally, set them off. The movements played with the notion of game play and tactile contact between people in the midst of sounds like the buzz of crickets and mosquitoes on a summer night. “What are you doing?” said one of the dancers as another placed her hand on her thigh. “Are you nervous?” the other replied, a question which became a recurring theme in the last half of the dance.
The audience truly enjoyed the seniors’ works.
Áine McCarthy ’10 said after the performance that she “was blown away by Stephanie Fungsang’s piece ’This is just to say.’ The thrill of watching such talented and powerful dancers perform was not only impressive but [also] refreshing for its celebration of pure movement in a dance environment that is often concept-heavy.”
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