Creative Research

Sharifa Lookman ’17 on dance’s interdisciplinary role in the course “Repertory and Performance: Thank You For Coming”

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Campus and Community Engagement Intern Sharifa Lookman ’17 reflects on interviews with Creative Campus Fellow Faye Driscoll and DanceLink Fellow Chloe Jones’15 in an examination of the interdisciplinary and multifaceted role of dance in the course “Repertory and Performance: Thank You For Coming.”

Thank You For Coming. Photo by Julie Lemberger.
Thank You For Coming.
Photo by Julie Lemberger.

I like to pretend that I know what art is and what it means to be “artsy”. Three years of arts high school where I learned the color wheel while taking AP classes and doing volunteer work misguided me into thinking that I also knew what it meant to be “interdisciplinary”. As the Campus and Community Engagement Intern my understanding of and exposure to interdisciplinary arts has been redefined. The mission of the Creative Campus Initiative at Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts is to create curricular and co-curricular activities in the arts that promote creativity and innovation both for students and faculty as well as artists. The Creative Campus Fellowship, which brings working artists into a university environment to accrue research for their project while teaching a class, adds new depths to the interdisciplinary understanding of the visual and performing arts.

I had the opportunity to sit down with choreographer, dancer, and Wesleyan University Creative Campus Fellow in Dance Faye Driscoll and her student DanceLink Fellow Chloe Jones ‘15. Through this fellowship Driscoll is researching and developing the project Thank You For Coming: Playin addition to teaching the course “Repertory and Performance: Thank You For Coming: Play”, an opportunity to gather research for her project. In addition to being given the inside scoop into the class, I had the opportunity to look into the minds of two artists who are seeking to re-define the field of dance performance, in the process re-conceptualizing their physical and emotional selves.

Speaking with Driscoll helped to create, what I find to be, a very helpful vocabulary for both defining dance and its integration with the other disciplines and further relating such study to a reconceptualization of our physical and emotional selves. Driscoll describes the title Thank You For Coming: Play as being emblematic of the project itself, despite its changing nature “its also directive in some sense, the word, or command, because I’m dealing with the act of make-believe and creating belief.”

Speaking with Driscoll about her childhood brought back memories of mine, both involving precocious kids with a penchant for creativity. Faye describes her younger self as “one of those kids who just knew that was what I wanted to do from like the age of four”. Illustrative of the type A, whirlwind of a child we knew, and envied, from our childhood, Driscoll would put on shows by herself, what she describes as being “often very political things that I knew or heard about going on in the world and would make a piece about it or perform a poem that I wrote about it.” Driscoll underlined her passion for the art form with this quick and nostalgic glimpse into her childhood fueled with naivety and creativity. With refocused eyes Driscoll said in earnest, “I think I just have this need to do it.”

This inherent need and passion inspired her to pursue dance, a practice that she quickly learned was not dependent solely on creativity, but rather the interconnectivity of creative expression and discipline and technique. Recalling this realization Driscoll said, “I think at one point my mom said, ‘if you do really want to do this, you have to actually go to class. And I loved dance class. It was the structure that fueled my creativity.”

Perhaps like many Wesleyan students Driscoll grew up in an environment that fostered creativity and expression. “I think that I really responded to this kind of structure and discipline that dance gave me. I think that those two things are in my work still – a lot of structure, a lot of layers, and a lot of detail. And then also this sense of irreverence, this sense that I can make whatever I want from whatever is closest, nearest, and whatever I want to grab from I can.”

The structure of Driscoll’s work incorporates this naivety and creativity integral to childhood and juxtaposes it with technical training. Integral to Driscoll’s work is a disintegration of the social and disciplinary constructs of dance in which technique is separate from creative expression. Dricoll argues a connectivity of these two factors, but additionally notes her desire to do anything but. Integral to Driscoll’s work is a sense of hybridization and a focus on the interdisciplinary relationships in the visual and performing arts. In speaking with Driscoll she noted the idea of the studio as a laboratory, almost bringing the field of dance into a realm likened to that of science. This vernacular adds an interesting, and yet unintentional, interdisciplinary element.

Inherent in her work is a passion and argument for reimagining the arts in addition to a defense for dance as a unique discipline that should be recognized as such.

“I want dance to be more central and I think that dance is a very radical art form that is often kicked down, kicked to the curb and seen as a lesser form. So I kind of like enjoying calling it all dance even though someone might see it and say that’s its not dance, y’know saying, ‘where’s the pirouette?’”

Driscoll asserts some very interesting points. The contemporary organization of the visual and performing arts is based on integration of the arts, but there is a fine line between integration and diffusion. Everything gets shaped into one conglomerate and they work together, but then at the same time the hierarchies between disciplines aren’t always broken down. This raises questions that we should consider at the Center for the Arts. In addition to fostering the interdisciplinary nature of the arts, they do need to be classified in some capacity.

The notion of interdisciplinary is fostered here at Wesleyan. This can be seen in the testimony of Chloe Jones, a Dance and Hispanic Literatures & Cultures major. Originally, however, she started out as a College of Letters major. Though she shifted her academic interests while abroad she continued to foster this interdisciplinary approach to her education and learning. She said “ I had a professor in the College of Letters tell me once that it isn’t really interdisciplinary, its multidisciplinary in the way that you get to draw from all of these different disciplines and then its up to you to integrate them. I think it’s something that has really stuck with me over the past few years is this idea of like drawing from lots of different disciplines and then your job as the student is to make those connections.”

Jones attended Driscoll’s initial lecture with a friend who is a COL major and were so taken by it that they both decided to take the class. This shows that, though rooted in dance, it is a topic and project that addresses issues of the self with so much universality that it appeals to all disciplines.

Jones described the lecture itself: “It was so rich, so much depth, so tangible and relatable and just like raw. And I felt like I could really see some of the ideas that she was bringing up in the talk: this broad idea of what is means to be a body in a world of Somebodies. And what does it mean to sort of be a co-creator of this narrative/reality that we are all living and how do we play with that reality/narrative and these social tropes that we are all living inside of.”

Driscoll’s class was composed of all different majors, about a quarter of them dance majors. This combination made for a diverse group of students that were willing to take risks and enact things using their different academic interests.

Both Jones and Driscoll described the activities they performed in class, contributing two different perspectives that illustrate the true complexity and brilliance of the project. One component specifically noted is that of dialogue and text and its incorporation with movement.

“One of the other assignments was to go around and find people to subtly imitate and become so we collected people from campus. So I might put those two things (eavesdropping and imitation) next to each other. The stolen people and the stolen dialogue,” Driscoll said.

One assignment that they had was a dialogue experiment comprised of three parts: 1.) To eavesdrop on a conversation for 15-20 minutes without taking any notes, only to have to sit down and rewrite the entire dialogue solely from memory 2.) To recall, without the assistance of diaries or the like, a dialogue from our personal memory, our personal lives 3.) To transcribe a dialogue from a movie or a play also from memory. All of these recorded dialogues were then brought in and shared with the class.

Through this exercise, and ones similar, students and Driscoll played a lot with voice, an area of performance not often addressed in dance.

“I think I come from a very choreographic way of thinking about things. I’m also very visually and aurally oriented. I’m interested in the body and all that it is and all that the human being is and all that our bodies contain in terms of our selfhood and our histories and the politics of them. The way that they’re kind of loaded,” Driscoll said.

This integration of voice with the body proved challenging to Jones, but also constructive.

“And for me its been a pretty huge challenge because, as a dancer, I’m accustomed to using my body and manipulating my body and expressing myself through my body, but when it comes to my voice there have been times in class when I have totally choked up and have felt very vulnerable using my voice.  At the same time I’ve felt really excited about this new possibility and this new kind of tool that I have to use.  It’s one that Faye is really exploring with us — how we can use our voices and how we can hone that skill. There is so much there. The voice truly is an instrument,” Jones said.

In addition to exploring the physical, whether the limbs or vocal chords, this course also explored the emotional. In describing this emotional component Jones repeatedly described it as “intense” but according to Jones, an intensity that “fed them”. In a sense this course became an examination of the self.

“I’ve definitely learned a lot about myself. I think we all have. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’m a dance major. In a lot of my non-dance classes I feel like I do my work, close my book, and leave. And with dance I feel like I walk out of the studio in my body, which is what I’ve been using to practice, to learn, to think. So it goes with me everywhere. So I get to carry it with me everywhere and translate it into other areas of my life, and that’s something that is really exciting and important to me. And that’s something that holds very much true to Faye’s class too,” Jones said.

I began this blog post with about ten pages of quotations. My conversations with Driscoll and Jones were both so rich and evocative that I had no idea where to go, what to analyze, and how to consolidate what are grand scale ideas. I sat on this post for far too long while other small seemingly pressing tasks took priority. I was nervous about articulating this weighty notion of examining oneself, so fully and creatively, through art. It’s such an abstract notion and with that comes fleeting temporality. One can revel in the process, but then the process has to end. And yet Jones still said that she is going to remember this experience forever, noting the power of memory. This idea, juxtaposed alongside Driscoll’s analysis of her project, Thank You for Coming as something that is not “wrapped up” attributes a sense of fluidity to the understanding of artistic practices and creative epiphanies. Maybe there is never an end to these creative moments or ideas. Like Jones said, “This course has never been about the final performance.” Perhaps I’m reading far too deep into what was simply a beautiful and fruitful creative exercise, but I can’t help but find a comparison to life’s journey: whether a life led creatively or not, the objective is not to end up with a nicely wrapped product, but rather to emerge with beautiful ideas, unanswered questions, and an experimental analysis of the self, all still dancing through one’s memories.

Sewon Kang ’14 on the “Blood, Muscle, Bone” intensives and performative teach-in (Nov. 11)

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Creative Campus Intern Sewon Kang ’14 discusses the intensives that have been part of the Creative Campus course “Blood, Muscle, Bone: The Anatomy of Wealth and Poverty,” as well as the free “Blood, Muscle, Bone” Performative Teach-In which will be held on Monday, November 11, 2013 from 7pm to 11pm in Fayerweather Beckham Hall. (The doors will open every 30 minutes—come and stay as long as you like.)

2012 residency of "Blood, Muscle, Bone" in Tallahassee. Photo by Aubrie Rodriguez.
2012 residency of “Blood, Muscle, Bone” in Tallahassee. Photo by Aubrie Rodriguez.

Having recently emerged from the “Blood, Muscle, Bone” intensives, adjusting to the rhythm of school again is almost like switching brains.  For five days, I employed a radically different mode of thinking and processing than I ever have before.  I moved, thought, and felt about many different issues surrounding wealth, poverty, and the body, and collaborated with my instructors and fellow students in surprising and new ways.

Our first few intensives were committed to the creation of a collective toolbox.  Our guest instructors, Professors William Arsenio, Wendy Rayack, and Lois Brown, gave lectures related to wealth and poverty through the lens of their particular fields.  From recent fiscal and experimental data, to the days of early American slave trading, the range of information presented to us walked us through an issue that transcends time and place, and affects all humans.

While listening to these lectures, Liz, Jawole, and their associates Vincent Thomas and Keith Thompson encouraged us to take on the role of the artist in addition to the role of the student. While listening, we posed questions and problematized the information, but we were also challenged to explore the information in ways that we would not necessarily have the freedom to do in other classrooms.  We paid attention and took note of the visualizations and soundtracks floating through our heads, and responded to the lecturer’s body language and cues with our own bodies.  Such prompts helped me realize that there are hundreds of angles from which this issue could be addressed which got me excited to further develop some of them with my classmates.

The lectures were punctuated by creative exercises and movement studies designed to give us more tools for our arsenal.  The artists devised activities that allowed us to explore deeper and respond to what we learned with our thoughts and emotions.  I was able to use my intellect and my body in combination to process the weight of the information.  Wealth disparity in the U.S. is at an all time high; the richest 400 individuals are worth $2.02 trillion dollars, more than the net worth of the bottom 50% of the population.  The immediacy of creative opportunities to process and react to such information was incredibly beneficial for me, as it’s sometimes difficult to take in facts, figures, and histories without taking into consideration their humanity and reality.  There was an amazing collaboration between the artists and guests lecturers, allowing us to experiment and process with total freedom and comfort that I deeply appreciated.

I find the prospect of communicating and translating my ideas into movement a bit daunting, but mostly thrilling.  Throughout the remainder of the intensive, Jawole, Liz, Vincent, and Keith had us create in small groups within limited timeframes.  Working like this helped me get more comfortable with the act of communicating my ideas in an artistic way.  I also got a taste for how creative and talented my peers are, and am excited to see what I can learn from working closely with them.

At one point, we all sat around in a circle and conducted an “asset inventory.”  Everyone in the room shared a skill or an aspect about themselves that makes a contribution to the community, and the diversity of responses and experiences in the class opened up so many possibilities.  I shared that I love to backpack and that I enjoy the challenge of carrying everything I need to survive on the strength of my own back.  Using this idea as a metaphor, a small group of students and I got together to figure out how to create a backpack for change and reported back to the group.  We created a movement piece that reflects on the meaning of carrying and sharing weight, and the necessity of being prepared for the tough times ahead.  Since then, we’ve been workshopping the piece with Keith and other students who have joined in on the process.  I’m really looking forward to where it will all go from here.

My fellow students and I have explored a lot of difficult problems and ideas in this course, some of which really hit home.  We’re continuing to process the material creatively through songwriting, photography, and movement among other things. We’re currently honing in on ways to articulate what we’ve learned to a wider audience.  As concerned citizens who are deeply disturbed by these inequities, we’re finding ways to express how to respond both personally and intellectually to the fact that there is something seriously wrong here.  We’ve become witness to these problems in our country and are determined to do something about it. We’re carrying this heavy reality on our backs.  We’re trying to deal with the weight of what it all means.

Our efforts will culminate in a special performance-based teach-in that will take place on Monday, November 11, 2013 from 7pm to 11pm every half hour in Fayerweather Beckham Hall. This teach-in is inspired by the activist movements that came before us, which emphasized the importance and need for knowledge first.  This experiential event is going to be multifaceted, with elements that enlighten, shock, and ask the audience to participate and think with us.  We’re going to use our bodies and various art forms to demonstrate the physicality of these issues to make issues of disparity tangible.  We’ll invite participants to move, feel, explore and engage in dialogue with us, because the only way we can address these issues is to do it together.

Sewon Kang ’14 on the course “Blood, Muscle, Bone: The Anatomy of Wealth and Poverty”

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Creative Campus Intern Sewon Kang ’14 discusses her experience in the Creative Campus course “Blood, Muscle, Bone: The Anatomy of Wealth and Poverty.”

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Liz Lerman. Photo by Bess Paupeck.
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Liz Lerman. Photo by Bess Paupeck.

This semester I’m taking “Blood, Muscle, Bone: The Anatomy of Wealth and Poverty,” a Creative Campus course taught by Liz Lerman and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. In my time at Wesleyan, I’ve had the privilege of interning for Creative Campus, an initiative that unites ideas and gets people thinking outside of their comfort zones.  Creative Campus hosts a wide variety of artists on campus, inviting them to employ their creative processes within the university setting for the mutual benefit of the artist and the Wesleyan community. Artists can participate by co-teaching courses with professors, experimenting with students in the classroom, creating commissions, and collaborating in community-based projects.  Liz and Jawole are choreographers, both heavily engaged in interdisciplinary work and community/cultural organizing.  In the spirit of Creative Campus, they are also teaching with professors from the fields of African American Studies, Economics, English and Psychology.  “Blood, Muscle, Bone” is designed to train and support students interested in discovering the bridge between academic and artistic research through the vehicle of a new performance work of the same name.  The course and the work explore the human price of socioeconomic inequalities, with particular emphasis on how to unveil and address hidden inequities through artmaking and various forms of activism.  Such collaborative Creative Campus projects allow artists to utilize resources that are unique to the university setting throughout the critical period of conceptual research that informs and drives their work.  The artist-university partnership is also designed to engage students and faculty members from diverse academic areas, bringing their different ways of knowing in communication with the arts.  The other students enrolled in “Blood, Muscle, Bone” have backgrounds in chemistry, music, and American studies, while my background is in Art History and History. The goal of the course is to open up traditional academic boundaries and encourage the exploration of a profoundly complex issue from multiple and varied perspectives.

I’ve found that the professors, artists, and students who tend to participate in Creative Campus projects are interested in exploring topics that are deeply multifaceted, so much so that it is virtually impossible to study these issues from one perspective alone.  I enrolled in “Blood, Muscle, Bone” because it addresses subject matter that is, in my opinion, impossible to study without taking the body into consideration.  Socioeconomic conditions/realities take place within the individual and collective body and should be explored within the context of the body and its social environment. The ideas that are compelling and asking to be probed require collaboration that is open to questioning from all possible angles and areas of expertise.  Creative Campus gives people a safe space in which to ask these questions and bring seemingly disparate ideas in communion with one another.  This method has been so liberating that participants of Creative Campus have found themselves completely changed upon being encouraged to think and do in this way.  Because of my work in this program, I’ve been witness to these very real transformations.  I read one student assert that the artistic element of a course “helped [her] to embody and reflect on our more traditionally academic material, and incorporate motion and emotion into a realm that is all too often static and emotionless.”  Another student said that the opportunity to consider something as complex as climate change through both artistic and academic impulses “has completely altered [her] understanding of the world.”  These are the kinds of intense impacts that Creative Campus has been able to instill in Wesleyan students, and I’m very much looking forward to experiencing it for myself.

“Blood, Muscle, Bone” was also appealing to me because of its emphasis on activism and the utilization of various activist tools to explore topics.  When it comes to academic pursuits, Wesleyan has always encouraged me to think about the whole picture, giving me the tools to consider all facets of an issue.  There are whole fields of study on campus dedicated to this idea that learning can only truly be achieved through input from multiple channels.  Creative Campus projects have taken this approach one step further by allowing me to embrace this way of thinking in my personal life, in addition to my pedagogical outlook.  Since I’ve been here, I’ve been lucky to meet and talk to many interesting artists like Eiko Otake, of Eiko + Koma, and Lucy Orta, of Studio Orta, who have generously taken the time to show students how to create with intention.  Artists employ research methods and ask questions that are challenging in ways that thrill and excite students who are in the process of discovering their own interests and passions, which is a major reason why I decided to take this course.

The issues that I’ve been challenged to think about and feel in my body at Wesleyan have forever changed me as a thinker and as a human being who aims to make an impact.  Since getting involved, I’ve been inspired to find my own form of political activism.  “Blood, Muscle, Bone” deals with the realities of wealth inequality, a topic that has always been on my mind.  Growing up in New York City, I’ve been exposed to both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum and have been amazed by how polarized the experiences of the rich and the poor can be.  Oftentimes I find this issue intimidating to talk about because of how pervasive and global the problem seems to be.  How does one begin to approach being proactive about poverty and how it affects the human mind/body?  How can one person, or a small group of people create something that speaks to these issues and affects communities in a positive way?  These are the questions I bring to the table before our first class intensive and I look forward to being able to explore these issues with my instructors and peers.  I know that the knowledge and experience gained from this course are going to give me the courage and motivation to tackle issues in ways that extend way beyond the scope of the classroom and long after I graduate in May.

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

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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

What it Means to Heal: Hannah Cressy ’13 reflects on Service-Learning in Greenpoint-Williamsburg

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Hannah Cressy ’13 concludes her four-part series on Wesleyan’s interdisciplinary course Ritual, Health, and Healing.

Community members Guido and Tish Cianciotta of GREC (sitting), Laura Hofmann of OUTRAGE, Chris Henderson of St. Nicks Alliance, and Pat Dobosz of GEM, pose with ANTH 289 students and faculty Gillian Goslinga and Jill Sigman at the close of the community ritual.

After weeks of seminars, movement labs, bus rides, and a lot of bonding time, our “Ritual, Health, and Healing” class has come to a close.  We had our final movement lab on Tuesday, which gave us a chance to reflect, share our thoughts, and be together as a group for the last time; half the class will be graduating this month.  We sat in a circle, drinking lemongrass tea and allowing time for final words, though we found ourselves still talking, laughing, and shedding a few appreciative tears for an hour after “class” had ended.  One student sent an email to all of us this week that began with “Hey fam!”; we definitely feel like we have moved beyond classmates to become a family because of the work we did together at Wesleyan and especially in Brooklyn.

Students Andrew Pezzullo '13 and Kate Enright '15 talk with Guido Cianciotta at a community meeting.

I’ve been blogging for the past month and a half about our trips to Brooklyn, where the class has been working at the St. Nick’s Alliance and in surrounding Greenpoint-Williamsburg neighborhoods.  We’ve met, interviewed, gone on walks, had tea, and celebrated with community members who taught us about their lives’ work.  Pat and David Dobosz are public school teachers who talked with us about the harmful social and educational effects of charter schools’ division of neighborhoods, and have been very inspirational for the future educators of our class, including my fellow blogger Shira Engel ’14.  Guido and Tish Cianciotta are the founding directors of Greenpoint Renaissance Enterprise Corporation, and have worked for decades to keep the Greenpoint Hospital complex serving the needs of the community; a group of students created a Wikipedia page for their organization.  Jan Peterson is a tireless (and very spunky) activist, feminist, organizer, and founder of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, among several other activist/feminist groups; several students interviewed Jan and Tish among other lifelong residents of the neighborhood for an oral history project on the women of Greenpoint.  I could go on for pages about many more incredible people we have been so lucky to learn from.

Pat Dobosz of GEM (Grassroots Education Movement) discusses with Shira Engel '14 how a public school education enriches a community.

Stepping outside the classroom walls taught us things we can’t learn from professors; it is a privilege to sit down with neighborhood residents and hear their stories of health issues due to environmental damage, struggles with educational equality, building rights, and organizing strategies, and we have truly come away with a new sense of what it means to be a neighbor.  As I’ve written before, Jan Peterson’s best advice to us was “if you live here, you have to do something.  You can’t just have brunch”.

We all began the course wondering how West African shamanism, Brooklynite activism, Japanese dolls, Wikipedia, and Peruvian water rituals would fit together.  During our final lab, we were asked to say one word each to sum up the course: I said “us”.  Any ritual, health, or healing requires a community consciousness, a sense of group wellbeing.  My classmates growing closer to each other was the overall lesson of the class:  whether you’re fighting a disease, spirit loss, or a trash dump, healing comes through a healthy community; it’s about us. 

For more reflections and information about the course, check out a recent article about the class here.

Ritual, Health, and Healing: Reflecting in the Classroom with Shira Engel ‘14

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A personal account by Shira Engel ’14 of “Ritual, Health, and Healing”, a course which is part of the Creative Campus initiative of the Center for the Arts.

As anything comes to a close, reflection seems to be in order. Journals emerge, nostalgic conversations take place, and commemoration and commencement activities ensue. College courses are no exception to this rule. This is especially the case for Ritual, Health, and Healing, a class rooted in the creative self-reflection of both the students and the professors.

My friend, Hannah Cressy ’13, has covered wonderfully our trips to Brooklyn as a class to work with the St Nicks Arts @ Renaissance community center. Both Jill Sigman and Gillian Goslinga have emphasized for us the importance of deconstructing the invisible barrier between “process” and “product.” This course is all about process because that is what inspires authenticity and the ability for self- and group-reflection to take place.

To be perpetually engaged in process is not an easy task. As college students, we are, at times, taught to pump out ten-pagers and study, study, study, just for the end product of an exam. Process means to do, and then let go of results – to do for the sake of doing and let the results be what they are. This is, at least, my definition.

Two weeks ago, as we geared up for our final field trip to Brooklyn, we were a product-driven bunch. We were scrambling to find time to finish our offerings to the community. At the same time, we were unsettled with this shift in perspective – this constant doing. So, we used our Monday seminar to step back, take a deep breath, and see what it is we are actually doing in the process. We made a list on the board of the common themes of our offerings and of our experiences with the community. They included: reciprocity, interconnectedness of community, the power of listening, valuing lived experience, choosing engagement over disengagement, family, and teachers. Writing them up on the board to be seen was clarifying. It put the passion back into what we were doing and allowed us to see that the offerings we were making to the community were also offerings to ourselves, giving ourselves the gift of all that we had mentioned.

Conversations, Research, and Exploration: In the Field with Hannah Cressy ’13

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Hannah Cressy ’13 continues her report on the service learning factor of Wesleyan’s inter-disciplinary course Ritual, Health, and Healing.

Photo by Marie Scarles.

Our “Ritual, Health, and Healing” class returned to Greenpoint-Williamsburg, Brooklyn this past Saturday to continue our conversations with community members and to do more historical research and neighborhood exploration.  We are focused on seeing and collecting (interviews, photo, film, trash, and more) and are planning to give our account to members of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg neighborhood in two weeks.  Our projects range from a short film to a waste transfer station walking tour, but all are meant to aid local grassroots organizations with their long-running goals of community awareness, communication, and activism.  The past two visits have greatly expanded our concepts of health and healing; both are intertwined with environmental conditions, politics, neighbor dynamics, educational equality, and simply feeling seen and heard in a city of 8 million.

David and Pat Dobosz, two local public school teachers, met with us again to have breakfast and taught us much more about educational reform in New York.  They spoke of the influx of charter schools and its effect on the economic, academic and emotional lives of local families.  Having met and married as public school teachers in their youth, they have been active for over forty years in the struggle for inclusive and equal public education for Brooklyn’s children.  Both David and Pat teach in buildings recently invaded by charter schools; they described the plunge in self-worth experienced by their students when charter school students receive better facilities and supplies than their public school.  Furthermore, we were surprised and upset to learn that charter schools generally do not accept students with Individual Education Plans, learning disabilities, and developmental disabilities, effectively reversing disability activists’ endless struggle for integrated classrooms.  David and Pat are active in the Grassroots Education Movement of New York and showed us much of their film, “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman”.

Photo by Marie Scarles.

A group of students especially interested in education equality continued the conversation with David and Pat while the rest of the class split into working groups to address other areas of interest, including garbage equity and environmental justice, neighborhood women’s histories, and archival research of the Greenpoint Hospital site which now houses St. Nick’s Alliance. The trash group, who is working with OUTRAGE, went on a tour of the neighborhood; they learned that many of the mini-dumps, plastic factories, and piles of trash they saw aren’t officially classified as waste transfer stations by the city, and thereby go unrecognized by outside environmental protection organizations.  In class on Monday, students recalled a baseball field above the Exxon Mobil oil spill, sandwiched between piles of street salt, discarded sheet metal, and plastic.  The group is collecting video and photos, and is working on a brochure to direct the public in a similar walking tour.

My group returned to the Brooklyn Public Library in the afternoon to continue poring over newspaper articles up to 100 years old detailing the long-running struggle to keep the Greenpoint Hospital open and in the hands of the community.  The area has a history of healthcare turmoil: we saw that current activism against insufficient and inequitable healthcare started long ago in Greenpoint-Williamsburg.   We hope that by presenting and recording our findings, we may provide further historical insight into the resilience and devotedness of the citizen-activists of the neighborhood.  In two weeks, we’ll return for a final weekend, where we will gather with many community members to celebrate the history of ideas, people, and place in Greenpoint-Williamsburg.  On that day, our professor Jill Sigman will also officially begin The Hut Project at St. Nick’s, in which she will build a hut out of found materials to serve “as a catalyst for local activities such as performance, video, artistic collaboration, and community dialogue”, as she has done in several other sites around the world.  We are all busily working on transcriptions, videos, posters, brochures, and websites, and are eager to share what we’ve learned with neighborhood residents on April 22, 2012. We hope this gathering of community members will be a step in healing a place that has faced years of struggle for health, education, unity and equality.

Ritual, Health, and Healing: In the Classroom with Shira Engel ’14

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A personal account by Shira Engel ’14 of “Ritual, Health, and Healing”, a course which is part of the Creative Campus initiative of the Center for the Arts.

Photo by Hailey Still.

“Ritual, Health, and Healing” is an interdisciplinary class that transcends disciplinary boundaries. It is cross-listed in Anthropology, Science in Society, and Dance. It is co-taught by Anthropology professor Gillian Goslinga and Artist in Residence Jill Sigman. Gillian Goslinga has an academic background in ethnographic research on ritual practices. Jill Sigman comes to Wesleyan from New York City, where she is a choreographer working in performance and installation, and directing her company jill sigman/thinkdance. She is currently engaged in her Hut Project. She also has a background in philosophy. The course is a true blend of the disciplines it is cross-listed in as well as the disciplines of the professors. As a student in the course, I find my mind being constantly expanded to think not in terms of a singular discipline, but to creatively combine them in ways that allows the material to sink in.

The course is divided into two segments. The first quarter of the semester, we learned about ritual, health, and healing and what these broad terms means to different cultures. This comprised the necessary theoretical component of the course that feeds into the service learning we are currently doing in Williamsburg-Greenpoint, Brooklyn (but I will let my lovely classmate Hannah elaborate on that in posts to come).

The course is also comprised of a three-hour seminar on Mondays and a movement lab on Tuesday evenings. On Monday, we discuss readings on the cultural and theoretical significance of ritual, health, and healing and on Tuesdays, we embody those readings and theories in movements that transcend the definition of dance.

Because we are constantly encouraged in this course to be self-reflexive, I will come out and say that I was attracted to this course in large part because on WesMaps, the description said that people without any dance experience are encouraged to apply. I do not consider myself a dancer and this course allows for a lack of labels. It allows for a blurring of the lines between disciplines, as well as a blurring of the lines between self-identified labels of artistic identity. After class, I talked to Jill Sigman about what makes this course creatively unique and she said, “This isn’t strictly a dance class. We may be using dance in the context of learning about other things, but there are people who are totally not here to learn to point their foot and that’s what makes it fascinating to me.”

This course shifts disciplinary boundaries in ways that make us – the students – uncomfortable, thrilled, challenged, self-reflexive, and on our toes. It challenges preconceptions of academic work, teaching us that it is inherently creative. Jill Sigman’s studio in Brooklyn is called “The Border.” In many ways, we exist on the border between disciplines, definitions of art, activism, and service in this course as we grapple with definitions of ritual, health, and healing. I am excited to see how these definitions will continue to unfold as we progress into the service learning, creatively translating the work we have done in the seminar and movement lab into practice, while realizing that all is part of the same process.

Ritual, Health, and Healing: In the Field with Hannah Cressy ’13

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Hannah Cressy ’13 reflects on Ritual, Health and Healing, co-taught by Gillian Goslinga, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Science in Society, and Jill Sigman, Choreographer and Founder of ThinkDance.

Photo by Hailey Still '12.

Last Saturday, our Ritual, Health, and Healing class took our first trip into Brooklyn to begin the service learning aspect of the course.  The class is cross-listed in Anthropology, Dance, and Service Learning, and during the month of April, we meet three times per week: once for a classroom seminar, once in a dance studio, and once in St. Nick’s community center in the heart of Williamsburg.  We have been invited to participate in a project with the citizen-activists of Greenpoint-Williamsburg that mixes community building, archival, art, and oral history, and found on Saturday that these three weeks will undoubtedly be more influential for our own ideas of community, activism, citizenship, art and democracy than we’d thought possible.

We arrived very early Saturday morning to St. Nick’s Alliance, and entered a former hospital basement and homeless men’s shelter that is now filled with the brilliant paintings of local children.  We were introduced to community members who’d lived in Greenpoint-Williamsburg their entire lives, and a few who’d just moved into the area.  Much like many post-graduate Wesleyan students, they were just beginning to learn what it means to live in the neighborhood.

Photo by Hailey Still '12.

We went around the circle to introduce ourselves; even in these first moments, we heard everyday people begin to tell their stories, naming lists of organizations they’ve been involved in for ten, twenty, or thirty years.  Issues faced by the community seemed endless, but so did the people and grassroots organizations that have long worked to better the area’s social and environmental climate.  Personal histories arose of unfair housing situations, families plagued by the same disease, identification with toxic sites—but never a hint that anyone wanted to leave.  This is their home, and they will stay and fight to make it safe.  Other community issues that came up in open-circle discussion included environmental justice, in reaction to a high density of waste stations in the area, fairness in education, the struggle to unify across ethnic, racial and income boundaries, gentrification and rising housing costs, and the loss of a community feel due to modernization.

Photo by Hailey Still '12.

Smaller groups formed to address more specific issues with organizations such as GREC (Greenpoint Renaissance Enterprise Corporation) and OUTRAGE (Organization United for Trash Reduction and Garbage Equity), while others took the opportunity to hold one-on-one conversations with community elders and longstanding citizen-activists from Greenpoint. Three students, including Haley Perkins ’13, Val Pucilowski ’13, and myself, will be conducting further archival research at the Brooklyn Library on the history of the Greenpoint Hospital complex that now houses St. Nick’s, affordable housing, and a smaller homeless shelter.  The use of the remaining unoccupied space is highly contested, and neighborhood activists are currently battling real estate developers to reclaim a building to be used for a much-needed affordable senior home.

In class on Monday, we discussed the most striking idea we’d heard on Saturday: we agreed, nearly unanimously, that Jan Peterson summarized the day’s most personal and influential message: wherever you live, you must be involved.  “You can’t just have brunch.”  Because we are in a community, we must give to it.  We should know our neighbors.  We are lucky to have the opportunity to join this community for the next few weeks in helping to preserve its spirit and connect its population while ourselves learning what it means to be a neighbor.

Liz Lerman: Embodied Knowledge

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“When excellence comes to excellence, and is sparked, there’s just nothing like that!” In this video, Liz Lerman discusses the innovative convergence of dance and science at Wesleyan University:

Liz Lerman: Embodied Knowledge

Many of you know that Wesleyan was the lead commissioner of Liz Lerman’s Ferocious Beauty: Genome, her groundbreaking work about the repercussions of genetic research.  One of Liz’s Wesleyan collaborators, Professor of Biology Michael Weir, wrote to her after the world premiere with an idea:

“Imagine a biology or genetics course that begins and ends with students experiencing [the Ferocious Beauty: Genome] piece, and imagine during the semester, when issues like Mendel or gene regulation or bioethics are covered, related parts of the piece were shown to the class. I am imagining that this experience would cause many students to build a new kind of framework in their minds causing them to be more inquisitive and thoughtful about the biology and its significance. They would make associations with the choreography and dance, and I wonder whether their thinking would be qualitatively richer?”

Five years later, with the support of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wesleyan and the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange developed Science Choreography – a website that’s a digital textbook with a plethora of tools for teachers who are teaching genetics, evolution and other related issues.

Liz Lerman and Elizabeth Johnson from the Dance Exchange, and Laura Grabel, Michael Weir, and Laurel Appel from Wesleyan’s Biology Department are discussing Science Choreography as part of the Hughes Program‘s special summer symposium in the Life Sciences.