Fall Thesis Dance Concert: Interlocking Chains and Interlocking Disciplines (Oct. 31-Nov.2)

Michelle Agresti ’14 interviews Sally Williams ’14, Elle Bayles ’14, and Naya Samuel ’14 about their works on the Fall Thesis Dance Concert, taking place Thursday, October 31 through Saturday, November 2, 2013 at 8pm in the Patricelli ’92 Theater.  

Photo by Andy Ribner '14.
Photo by Andy Ribner ’14.

Walking into the Patricelli ’92 Theater late one night last week, I was greeted with the sight of a giant web made of gold chain that stretched from floor to ceiling—no, Second Stage is not running a haunted house, it’s just a set piece for the Fall Thesis Dance Concert, another big event that’s happening this weekend. The concerts this weekend will showcase one half of three dance majors’ theses, since a thesis in the dance major means creating two works, one for both semesters of your senior year. Sally Williams ’14, Elle Bayles ’14, and Naya Samuel ’14 are all premiering their first dances starting Thursday, October 31 and going through Saturday, November 2 at 8pm in the Patricelli ’92 Theater.

The giant gold web belongs to Ms. Williams. Her dance is depicting the way cells in the brain act when effected by Alzheimer’s disease—portraying in dance the neurophysical side of Alzheimer’s. The dancers will be repeating dance phrases, but mutating them and mixing them up during the course of the dance, representing how memories and tasks are scrambled. The dance was choreographed by giving the dancer prompts and asking them to come up with these dance phrases on their own, and then Ms. Williams subsequently took their movements and patterned them how she wished. The gold web is meant to evoke the interconnected web of neural pathways in our brains, and it will come apart during the dance, just as it comes apart in a brain afflicted with Alzheimer’s.

“In Alzheimer’s—it’s interesting, you have both an accumulation of new proteins or products in the brain as well as death of the actual neurons in the brain,” illustrates Ms. Williams. “So it’s this kind of interesting complex of degeneration but also accumulation.”

Ms. Williams choose the topic because it has both personal and academic importance to her, as she has done clinical research on Alzheimer’s as well as has two grandmothers with the disease. The reason that Ms. Williams has been in a lab working with Alzheimer’s is because she is a Molecular Biology and Biochemistry major in addition to Dance. She’s choosing to express the more clinical aspects of the disease through dance in her thesis because she believes that as a teaching tool, this performance will reach a wider audience—and be more entertaining.

“I’m trying to use dance as a way to illustrate this very complex biology in a more accessible way,” says Ms. Williams. “Because when you’re sitting there listening to a fifteen minute long lecture on dying cells and dying neurons, no one’s gonna listen to that. I’m trying to use dance as a medium for people to listen and learn. “

Studying both dance and science at once at Wesleyan have definitely contributed to her academically mixed thesis. The two subjects have encouraged her to think about how the unlikely pair are connected to each other. Additionally, the Dance Department itself has had a strong effect on her choreography and subject choice.

Ms. Williams explains, “The biggest thing about the Dance Department that’s influenced my work is how open it is and how receptive it is to different ideas. My work is really very interdisciplinary and they are very very receptive to that.”

Ms. Williams’ dance this semester is part of a larger project about dance and disease. For her spring piece, she’s going to be examining Alzheimer’s effects from an emotional and lifestyle perspective.

Ms. Williams says “My whole big general thesis is exploring intersections of illness in American contemporary dance.”

For this project, aside from her own choreography on Alzheimer’s, she is researching Bill T .Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company works during the AIDS crisis, and Mark Morris Dance Group, who teaches dance classes to people with Parkinson’s.

Ms. Bayles is also exploring illness and dance, but from a quite literal psychological perspective. As Ms. Williams put it earlier, these inter-departmental projects are “so Wes.”

Ms. Bayles describes her thesis as “exploring psychiatric methods through exploring choreographic methods.” She is looking at how the psychological process of talking to and treating patients is related to how dance choreographers created their pieces with their dancers. She does this by using different choreographic methods with her own dancers and studying the process. For her first dance, she is looking at the choreography of Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch.

Mr. Cunningham was a dancer under the famous Martha Graham. She was influenced by her psychologist father, who was of Freud’s psychoanalytical tradition. Ms. Bayles explains that Mr. Cunningham’s choreographic method, which was “very movement for movement’s sake,” in her words, was effected by psychoanalysis.

Ms. Bausch, on the other hand, approached choreography a different way.

“[She] is very inspired by emotion, and she asks her dancers very elaborate questions and then their choreography comes from their actual dance,” says Ms. Bayles.

For her thesis, Ms. Bayles has mixed these two methods together. This combination of styles to find your own choreographic voice is something that she says the Dance Department definitely emphasizes in its curriculum.

“I was just playing around with the two types of choreography,” she says. “[It] turned into sort of more about relationships and emotions changing.”

Ms. Samuel, in a bit of a departure from the more scientifically oriented theses of Ms. Williams and Ms. Bayles, has choreographed a dance with an eye towards social commentary and resistance.  As a double American Studies and Dance major, this topic is something that Ms. Samuel has academically studied as well.

Ms. Samuel describes her thesis in an email: “I’m looking at the production of individuality [and the production of difference] on the American body, and how this is achieved under/helpful to the project of capitalism and the sustainment of our hegemony.”

For her dance this semester, however, she is not attempting to portray abstract philosophical ideas. She is using her dancers to demonstrate and explore how the body is involved in these identity-construction battles, and how the body and dance can push back against theses forces.

She writes, “[My dance is] a literal use of bodies in relation to each other and the space they’re sharing to demonstrate different power relationships and normalizations.”

For the Fall Thesis Dance Concert, each choreographer has brought her own perspective to their dances. In a “very Wesleyan,” as Ms. Williams put it, way, each dance brings together the teachings of the Dance Department with each person’s academic interests. Between the works of Ms. Williams, Ms. Bayles, and Ms. Samuel, the Fall Thesis Dance Concert this weekend is sure to be an educational and entertaining night.

Fall Thesis Dance Concert
Thursday, October 31 through Saturday, November 2, 2013 at 8pm
Patricelli ’92 Theater
$4 Wesleyan students, $5 all others

Introducing “Sonic Introductions” (Oct. 17)

Matthew Chilton ’16 previews the free concert “Sonic Introductions: Graduate Student Composers at Wesleyan,” which will be held on Thursday, October 17, 2013 at 8pm in CFA Hall.

Wesleyan’s musical diversity is one of the most celebrated facets of its student life. Float between conversations as the weekend begins and you’ll inevitably hear talk of the next great show at Eclectic, Buddhist House, or another notable space on campus. But listen a little closer, and you’ll hear a quieter buzz—tune in—it sounds a little like a homemade oscillator, or a circuit-bent stylophone, perhaps a clarinetist falling down a flight of stairs. You really don’t know what it is, but your intellectual and musical curiosity implore you to check it out—after all, that’s why you’re here in this narrative, right?

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Photo by Derek Morton

Bring your curiosity and sharpened ears to the CFA Hall tonight at 8pm for “Sonic Introductions,” a concert dedicated to new works of Wesleyan music graduate students. This is a special type of concert that often falls under the radar for undergrads, and certainly not one to miss. Fortunately, that weird sound got your attention earlier. Each of the artists who will present their work tonight embodies part of what makes Wesleyan such a vibrant musical environment. Each composer brings a distinct background and developed musical persona, ensuring that no two pieces will sound alike.

The musicians’ approach to composition is not limited to the standard dots on paper. Peter Blasser and Daniel Fishkin, both instrument builders, liken their methods of composing to building new instruments. Mr. Blasser focuses on building a core composition, and then transforming it as if manipulating the knobs on a synthesizer. He describes his piece as something of a “product demonstration,” challenging the common performer-audience dynamic by focusing on the principles of his instrument rather than codified notions of form and intention.

Mr. Fishkin builds daxophones, bowed, amplified wooden tongues whose sounds are oddly human grunts and moans, as well as varieties of electronic music. He challenges notions of traditional composition by eschewing the pen-and-paper methods of conventional music for something more personal and intuitive. His composition is intimately bound up in his experience with tinnitus, the hallucinatory hearing disorder. In order to cope with the incessant whining in his ears, his response is to “compose himself.”

Nathan Friedman began his musical life as a classical clarinetist, before transitioning his playing into the worlds of experimental improvisation, contemporary chamber music, and klezmer. His work searches for a sound that is non-idiomatic, well beyond the reaches of a single style. He seeks to make the complex sound simple, while denying his listener a definite stylistic point of reference. The piece he premieres tonight is entitled Four Domestics for voice and piano, on texts by the Canadian socialist poet F.R. Scott. It will be sung by Stephanie Trotter, a wonderful vocalist and frequent collaborator.

Like Mr. Friedman, soprano saxophonist Jasmine Lovell-Smith is striving for a music that renders stylistic boundaries irrelevant. However, she takes a different approach, focusing on strong melodies and naturally unfolding harmonies that invite the listener to take refuge in her soundworld. Her jazz background informs her writing and improvisations, yet her composition relies on the ear rather than the analytical mind. Tonight, she premieres a setting of a poem by e.e. cummings for an ensemble of voice, clarinet, and guitar.

Violinist Dina Maccabee comes from a varied stylistic background of folk, pop, classical, and improvised music. She cites the chameleon-like versatility and easy portability of her instrument as her portal into many musical worlds. Her compositions for this concert revolve around the melodic and timbral interactions between her voice and violin, refined into short pop songs. Taken out of their original theatrical context, Ms. Maccabee uses this new setting to explore the intentionality behind her work.

Gabriel Kastelle, the other violinist on the program, eschews his instrument of choice to direct one of Wesleyan’s finest student vocal ensembles – the Mixolydians. Mr. Kastelle’s background has deep roots in everything from folk fiddle music to the avant-garde. His piece this evening is rooted in the American art of shape note singing, a simple and easy-to-read notation system for vocal ensembles that developed at the beginning of the 19th century in New England. Mr. Kastelle doesn’t complicate this accessible language, working with the interesting sounds possible within the scope of one key. His brief piece utilizes what he calls a “narrative form,” avoiding overly linear developments while letting motifs elaborate and unfold.

Also presenting works tonight are Hallie Blejewski, Sam Dickey, Sean Sonderegger, Cristohper Ramos Flores, and Jason Brogan, all powerful composers with backgrounds and stylistic aims as varied as those mentioned above. “Sonic Introductions” promises to be an unforgettable showcase of some of the most creative and groundbreaking work in music happening at Wesleyan this year. I’m excited just writing about it.