Cycle 3: PALIMPSEST
Posted: December 11, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »As I ponder the 3rd iteration of this cyclical project, I am reminded of how much time is an incredibly valuable resource in the RSVP cycle. I have struggled with feeling so close to my MFA project both in choreography and projection design that there have been moments where I have been unable to see what is actually occurring. A huge moment of learning occurred for me following our Thanksgiving break. With the gift of a few days away from OSU, I found myself able to view my choreography and projection design with more fresh eyes and some objectivity. Within a very quick turnaround, I was able to determine some factors that has made a tremendous impact on this cycle.
In this cycle, performance and valuaction were deeply important. I was working towards a Dec 5th showing in the Dance Dept to all faculty and also our Cycle 3 presentations on Dec 9th. I wanted to create and show at least 10 minutes of choreography and projection design accompanied by some music, lighting, and costuming ideas so that my advisors and peers could have a sense of the world I was trying to communicate and access through this piece.
My initial goals for this cycle were to slow down the projections and create some more negative space on the floor for my dancers to move through and emulate an interactive relationship with the projection. Through both feedback from faculty, peers, and other artists, I realized that the projection on the floor had a very strong definitive edge of a rectangle that actively shrunk a lot of the dancing space. This meant that whenever a dancer stepped out of the perimeter of the rectangle, it looked like a mistake in choreography. To combat this, I initially attempted to use a crescent or circle shape as a mask in Isadora, but still felt like the shape was far too crisp. Due to time constraints, I was unable to finish a version of the projection that utilized organic shapes for the Dec 5th showing in the Dance Dept.
In the Dec 5th showing, my cohort had decided to use the black marley in the Barnett which meant that this would be my first time seeing the projections on a black floor. In all honesty, I was quite delighted by the black floor—there was a sense of depth and texture that the black floor offered that was not quite accessible when compared to the white floor. This piece, currently entitled PALIMPSEST, references a manuscript where text is effaced and then new text is written upon it. I view each dancer as deeply important to the layering of the piece. I intend that PALIMPSEST communicates a meditation on small nuanced intercultural experiences that draw from my Taiwanese-American diasporic worldview.
Below is the video of the Dec 5th showing
Following the Dec 5th showing, I was finally able to take the time to figure out how to use an organic shape as a mask. I wanted to use an image of a banyan tree from Taiwan. This felt like a little Easter egg for myself—I frequently imagine the movement of my dancers as hybrid bird-banyan trees. With support from Annelise, I figured out how to use the banyan tree as a mask in Isadora and was deeply surprised at how the organic shape transformed the possibilities of the projection.
In our Cycle 3 presentation on Dec 9, I showed a new version of the projection that played with more negative space and utilized the banyan tree mask. I also began to play with adding some more blackouts in the projection so that I could imagine what the choreography could look like without any projection. I am imagining that for my 20ish minute piece, projection will only be present for at most half to two-thirds of the piece.
In our feedback during cycle 3, I was glad to hear that the black floor resonated with my peers and that the banyan tree mask created a feeling that the projection was another dancer. People used words like desert, tension, moss, mind of its own to describe the projection in collaboration with music. I do feel that these words reflect where I desire to go forward in this project. I would like to be able to envision the projection as another dancer in the space. Returning to the RSVP cycle, I want to acknowledge that I am at the stage of making where I deeply need some time away before returning to see what I have actually made. As I look towards the next cycles leading up to my MFA project performance at the end of February 2025, I desire to return to solidifying what the choreography is so that I can make more informed choices about when the projections might be dancing in the space with the other performers.