Rachel Bruce Johnson
MFA Candidate
Professional Presentation
My work is influenced largely by a background in photography. Photography, being a visual art, has also influenced how I see the choreographic problem in the studio through composition and perspective. Because of this and other forms of visual training, I am used to looking through a viewfinder as a means of focusing the details and seeing aspects of a dance that are important to aesthetic craft. Likewise, my experience with photography has greatly influenced the way I organize and make sense of movement in film, in performance, and in the classroom.
Consistent in all my graduate work the past three years has been a practice of intentionally shifting perspective as a means of creating ways of working. All of my work translates through a process of visual stimulation and kinesthetic awareness. It has become evident that my ability to look at a problem from multiple perspectives is a way of theoretical embodiment. Being a kinesthetic learner, this practice of shifting perspectives is an integral part in connecting the conceptual to the embodied. Even when I dislocated my elbow the summer of 2005, I was forced to rethink my body patterns in technique class and reflect on the influence my body has on my work as an artist from day to day. I chose to engage in my work from this altered point of view.
In my time here at TWU, I have made several dances and films; each project came to fruition under a similar process even though the outcome had varying levels of success. With White After Labor Day, I had some strong movement ideas and compositional images; however, I had difficulty seeing how to connect the images in a kinesthetic and moving way. In dive, a multi-media piece for live performance, I wanted to make the video footage another performer in the dance. I tried to create a frenetic energy with the dancers while the subject in the video footage juxtaposed variance and indicated a piece of the narrative. Again, that was a difficult piece given the problematic nature of multi-media and lack of time in my process to oscillate through how I understood the choreography of the video footage, how I understood the dancer’s movement in rehearsal, and how the two related to one another. With both Last Thread and She Drew a Picture of a Whale, I was working with connecting the movement images created in a more logical kinesthetic way. Though much of the methodology in creating the pieces was different, I created (together with Brooke Schlecte for She Drew a Picture of a Whale) what was, in effect, a sketch of a dance that then could be worked over more meticulously. I took the movement phrases and the developing structure and shaded in this area, then smudged a bit of this out to sketch in new connecting ideas for further editing. This was done by looking at video footage of rehearsal, spending time imagining with the music, and actualizing the movement in order to make the choreographic choices more visible. Making and editing films has contributed to understanding how I make sense through shifting perspectives by allowing time-spent seeing and feeling movement simultaneously while imagining segments or dance phrases in different orders with different consequences in various scenarios. Much like learning to focus the details and pay attention to composition in photography, video editing has helped me to see the choreographic problem in a non-linear way, from multiple angles, simultaneously. Here are some clips from my choreography.
[SHOW CHOREOGRAPHER REEL]
As a performer, I have enjoyed a wide variety of performance opportunities. This has allowed me to engage in multiple performance processes in an effort to remain open to sense-making possibilities. Different performance demands have further stretched my understanding of movement interpretation through effort, execution, focus, and subtlety, giving me a wider range of perspectives from which to shift. It is a constant practice to weigh the kinesthetic experience of movement from a choreographer checked against the choreographer’s intent or the collective intent being guided by the choreographer as a piece is being made. Actualizing my performance choices is a must and being open to listen, relate, abstract, or contradict movement ideas is key to helping me understand the relevancy of those choices, juxtaposing my experience of the dance in craft and that of the choreographer’s intent.
[SHOW PERFORMANCE CLIP]
As a teacher and mentor, I am concerned with developing classes that address the application of movement concepts and principles that will serve students regardless of the movement vocabulary. Shifting weight, awareness, and/or focus is of primary concern to me as I coach a dance or develop a class. In an effort to make evident the depth of personal choice and ownership available in the experience of dance as an art form, I train dancers to be aware of thoughts, feelings, and movement simultaneously, whether working in technique class, crafting a performance, or creating choreography. I believe this allows the student to find her/himself in a place where margins are permeable.
In an effort to clarify the visual aspects of sense making in dance, I created a professional project by taking existing stage choreography from my repertoire, a piece entitled She Drew a Picture of a Whale and re-conceptualized it for film. The project began with the creation of a storyboard that would depict the initial concept and trajectory of the film. I personally edited the film as a way of engaging kinesthetically in the choreographic process. A formal journal was kept to document creative choices and record perceptions of meaning in the stage production of She Drew a Picture of a Whale. The journal also served to note what viewers saw and felt during the live performance for comparison with feedback from the draft film screenings of the dancefilm version. To understand my perspective on the project I must first situate myself as a filmmaker with a specific way of working. I developed a kinesthetic approach to the filmic and choreographic process by incorporating my aesthetic movement training with the visual nature of film in both the stage version and the film production of She Drew a Picture of a Whale.
The central focus of this approach was to create shifts in choreographic perspective through visual stimulation (watching the film footage) and kinesthetic awareness (attuning to internal responses felt from performance and from watching the film footage in edited form). This gave a clearer picture of what the visual does to movement in relation to choreographic ideas – what works and what doesn’t – and highlights the images and transitions that create meaning. It is the act of shifting that creates interplay between kinesthetic and visual information imperative in making choreographic decisions.
The project involved the development of a process consisting of using my imagination to conceptualize, engaging performance and editing techniques as means of embodiment, and attuning to meaningful connections and attending to those transitions. By examining the choreographic experience in this project, the following patterns emerged:
To illustrate this, I’d like to show the beginning of both the stage production and the dancefilm.
[SHOW EXERPTS OF STAGE PRODUCTION & FILM]
Even though the stage production and the dancefilm centralize around body image as a concept, these are two very different dances. In a feedback session after an adjudicated concert featuring the stage production, one juror indicated that the dance suggested a filmic quality that allowed him to think of the dance from multiple perspectives in a provocative way. The ‘filmic quality’ suggested indicates that this particular stage piece lent itself to re-conceptualization as a dancefilm; however, it can be a more difficult task with another dance work. Movement simply captured by the film camera is only a semblance of the dance. The dance is altered for interpretation by the technology. It then becomes important to consider how a dance is represented on film.
Turning to examine my kinesthetic experiences in dance, I have also realized a shift from traditional training to conceptualizing my artistic processes in new ways. This shift is seemingly due to the abridged understanding I have brought to each new problem in creating work. Because of geographic location, technological deficiencies, and lack of traditional dance community, this shift has forced me to engage alternative perspectives to either broaden my understanding or question conventional methods of art making. For example, the allure of creating dance for camera films initially bloomed from a need for choreographic portability, repeatability, and independence from rehearsal space or working with additional dancers. Thus the body of my work is a fusion of visual and aesthetic training into a specific way of working and moving. This way of working hinges on the act of shifting between the perspectives my training provides.
MFA Candidate
Professional Presentation
My work is influenced largely by a background in photography. Photography, being a visual art, has also influenced how I see the choreographic problem in the studio through composition and perspective. Because of this and other forms of visual training, I am used to looking through a viewfinder as a means of focusing the details and seeing aspects of a dance that are important to aesthetic craft. Likewise, my experience with photography has greatly influenced the way I organize and make sense of movement in film, in performance, and in the classroom.
Consistent in all my graduate work the past three years has been a practice of intentionally shifting perspective as a means of creating ways of working. All of my work translates through a process of visual stimulation and kinesthetic awareness. It has become evident that my ability to look at a problem from multiple perspectives is a way of theoretical embodiment. Being a kinesthetic learner, this practice of shifting perspectives is an integral part in connecting the conceptual to the embodied. Even when I dislocated my elbow the summer of 2005, I was forced to rethink my body patterns in technique class and reflect on the influence my body has on my work as an artist from day to day. I chose to engage in my work from this altered point of view.
In my time here at TWU, I have made several dances and films; each project came to fruition under a similar process even though the outcome had varying levels of success. With White After Labor Day, I had some strong movement ideas and compositional images; however, I had difficulty seeing how to connect the images in a kinesthetic and moving way. In dive, a multi-media piece for live performance, I wanted to make the video footage another performer in the dance. I tried to create a frenetic energy with the dancers while the subject in the video footage juxtaposed variance and indicated a piece of the narrative. Again, that was a difficult piece given the problematic nature of multi-media and lack of time in my process to oscillate through how I understood the choreography of the video footage, how I understood the dancer’s movement in rehearsal, and how the two related to one another. With both Last Thread and She Drew a Picture of a Whale, I was working with connecting the movement images created in a more logical kinesthetic way. Though much of the methodology in creating the pieces was different, I created (together with Brooke Schlecte for She Drew a Picture of a Whale) what was, in effect, a sketch of a dance that then could be worked over more meticulously. I took the movement phrases and the developing structure and shaded in this area, then smudged a bit of this out to sketch in new connecting ideas for further editing. This was done by looking at video footage of rehearsal, spending time imagining with the music, and actualizing the movement in order to make the choreographic choices more visible. Making and editing films has contributed to understanding how I make sense through shifting perspectives by allowing time-spent seeing and feeling movement simultaneously while imagining segments or dance phrases in different orders with different consequences in various scenarios. Much like learning to focus the details and pay attention to composition in photography, video editing has helped me to see the choreographic problem in a non-linear way, from multiple angles, simultaneously. Here are some clips from my choreography.
[SHOW CHOREOGRAPHER REEL]
As a performer, I have enjoyed a wide variety of performance opportunities. This has allowed me to engage in multiple performance processes in an effort to remain open to sense-making possibilities. Different performance demands have further stretched my understanding of movement interpretation through effort, execution, focus, and subtlety, giving me a wider range of perspectives from which to shift. It is a constant practice to weigh the kinesthetic experience of movement from a choreographer checked against the choreographer’s intent or the collective intent being guided by the choreographer as a piece is being made. Actualizing my performance choices is a must and being open to listen, relate, abstract, or contradict movement ideas is key to helping me understand the relevancy of those choices, juxtaposing my experience of the dance in craft and that of the choreographer’s intent.
[SHOW PERFORMANCE CLIP]
As a teacher and mentor, I am concerned with developing classes that address the application of movement concepts and principles that will serve students regardless of the movement vocabulary. Shifting weight, awareness, and/or focus is of primary concern to me as I coach a dance or develop a class. In an effort to make evident the depth of personal choice and ownership available in the experience of dance as an art form, I train dancers to be aware of thoughts, feelings, and movement simultaneously, whether working in technique class, crafting a performance, or creating choreography. I believe this allows the student to find her/himself in a place where margins are permeable.
In an effort to clarify the visual aspects of sense making in dance, I created a professional project by taking existing stage choreography from my repertoire, a piece entitled She Drew a Picture of a Whale and re-conceptualized it for film. The project began with the creation of a storyboard that would depict the initial concept and trajectory of the film. I personally edited the film as a way of engaging kinesthetically in the choreographic process. A formal journal was kept to document creative choices and record perceptions of meaning in the stage production of She Drew a Picture of a Whale. The journal also served to note what viewers saw and felt during the live performance for comparison with feedback from the draft film screenings of the dancefilm version. To understand my perspective on the project I must first situate myself as a filmmaker with a specific way of working. I developed a kinesthetic approach to the filmic and choreographic process by incorporating my aesthetic movement training with the visual nature of film in both the stage version and the film production of She Drew a Picture of a Whale.
The central focus of this approach was to create shifts in choreographic perspective through visual stimulation (watching the film footage) and kinesthetic awareness (attuning to internal responses felt from performance and from watching the film footage in edited form). This gave a clearer picture of what the visual does to movement in relation to choreographic ideas – what works and what doesn’t – and highlights the images and transitions that create meaning. It is the act of shifting that creates interplay between kinesthetic and visual information imperative in making choreographic decisions.
The project involved the development of a process consisting of using my imagination to conceptualize, engaging performance and editing techniques as means of embodiment, and attuning to meaningful connections and attending to those transitions. By examining the choreographic experience in this project, the following patterns emerged:
- The process is nonlinear, meaning one can jump from one aspect to another in no particular order.
- All aspects of the process needed to happen in order to perpetuate the development of the dancefilm.
- All aspects need to be accountable to body, frame, and editing or filmic rhythms.
To illustrate this, I’d like to show the beginning of both the stage production and the dancefilm.
[SHOW EXERPTS OF STAGE PRODUCTION & FILM]
Even though the stage production and the dancefilm centralize around body image as a concept, these are two very different dances. In a feedback session after an adjudicated concert featuring the stage production, one juror indicated that the dance suggested a filmic quality that allowed him to think of the dance from multiple perspectives in a provocative way. The ‘filmic quality’ suggested indicates that this particular stage piece lent itself to re-conceptualization as a dancefilm; however, it can be a more difficult task with another dance work. Movement simply captured by the film camera is only a semblance of the dance. The dance is altered for interpretation by the technology. It then becomes important to consider how a dance is represented on film.
Turning to examine my kinesthetic experiences in dance, I have also realized a shift from traditional training to conceptualizing my artistic processes in new ways. This shift is seemingly due to the abridged understanding I have brought to each new problem in creating work. Because of geographic location, technological deficiencies, and lack of traditional dance community, this shift has forced me to engage alternative perspectives to either broaden my understanding or question conventional methods of art making. For example, the allure of creating dance for camera films initially bloomed from a need for choreographic portability, repeatability, and independence from rehearsal space or working with additional dancers. Thus the body of my work is a fusion of visual and aesthetic training into a specific way of working and moving. This way of working hinges on the act of shifting between the perspectives my training provides.