Thesis Proposal
I am currently investigating how to divide space and the relationships that can be built from doing such. My first step within my choreographic process was to not give any relation to space. When my dancers ask me, "which direction is front?" I simply responded, "There is no front." I initially wanted to create a work that would be staged and viewed in the round. However, later began to realize that I am obsessed with reflection so now have decided to split the audience so they face one another.

I am interested in exploring all possible pathways to move thru and around doors including all the existing doors within the Lund theatre. I plan to incorporate all existing doors for entrances and exits. My main goal in this piece is try to develop patterns of these pathways. I want to be able to create specific spaces and then break them with new pathways. I want to create structures in how the work is viewed and then right before it becomes predictable or clear to the viewer and then disrupting that pattern by introducing new patterns of choreography as a pathway of locomotion thru the space. Currently I am working on the juxposition of angular almost grid like pathways to curved and circular pathways, and trying to figure out how to transition from one to the other. My hope is to provide one side of the audience different information then the other and then reversing the positioning of the set and revealing a new dance that is slightly accumulated more information of the relationship between individuals and their connection to the space. I intend to do so by shifting the set ninety degrees. The change of position of the set now reverses the audiences' original viewpoint. By doing so, I hope to create an accumulation of knowledge that was once withheld by the obstruction of the set.

My set includes an absolutely bare Lund theatre (black box theatre) with the exception of lighting trees, seating for???, and two doors. These doors, designed by Mike Zimmerman, will be within the center of the theatre suspended from the catwalk. My vision for the audience initial entrance to the space is to be stark, minimal, almost like a gallery installation. They are to be directed to either sides of seating on both south and north sidewalls. Directed inward to the center of the space where one door divides the space and creates a plane, or imaginary wall, that is parallel to one side of the audience. The other door would be placed perpendicular to the first door up or down stage (depending which side being viewed from). By doing so I wish to create opportunities to view action on only one side of one door as well as both sides of the other. My motivation for using doors is their versatility. I have found doors to be metaphorically loaded as well as extremely ambiguous. The placement of the doors is essential to the conceptual structure for the dance.



I would consider this work to be a multi narrative within a non-linear structure. This work is a story of five people's journey thru life. They encounter decisions, themselves, relationships, and each other. The door can represent different stages of life. The main problem for these people is deciding when to open, close, and go thru the door. The action of the door whether it is closed or open will have very different impact on how the choreography is viewed. It is then my challenge to arrange the dancers and choreography to the space in order to build relationships, to each other and to the space. Then arranging these relationships to accumulate meaning. I feel as though the relationship between each dancer and each door is different. My choreography is abstractions of multiple English phrases such as "Opportunity knocks" "Leave your problems at the door" and "If you walk out that door I'll..." Movement phrases developed from such sayings are then manipulated thru space. Specifically the spaces in relation to the door, connecting doors, the space within the doors. My goal is too connect the choreographic mutations of the sayings onto an action with the door.



In this piece I feel as though the decision making process of what action to take towards the door is an inner negotiation of chance within the psyche. To me the best representation of negotiation, or foreplay if you will, is the tango. I have two composers, Daniel Corral and Eric Walton, working on creating rhythmus with the tango in mind. Whether it is a deconstruction of the tango or a reflection of the genre, they have both started with arranging door samples. Now I am sure one has to wonder about the tango. I also have a personal connection to the tango because it originates from Argentina, which is where my father is from. This small gesture of influence is to pay slight homage to him and the rest of my family living there. Another possible question would be why two composers? I am interested in creating a duality of two worlds, two perspectives on how the work is to be viewed in doing so I also want to present two different scores developed from the same themes and movements.



Susanne Scott's costuming ideas have gone through many different stages. As of now, we are working with linen. Linen is a desirable texture that loosely based from the notion of the tango but more importantly has a great weight that will accentuate the movement vocabulary of the piece. In addition to the costumes, lending themselves from the inspirational source of the music and choreographic task, but the costume design also plays off the ideas of lighting structure.



The lighting design will help facilitate the audiences focus, as well as shape and transform the pathways the dancers construct and deconstruct. Through lighting, I want to emphasize the differences of each space connected by doors. The costumes will be affected by the light of each segmented pathway. My initial idea of the doors was to think of them as portals. To me this meant each transition through each door would lead to somewhere very different from the last. Borrowing from the rules of additive color theory the costumes will have painted designs that reflect different colors while in different spaces.