Something that scared you...

This semester I was required to create a junior dance work for my choreography class that we cast dancers for, set up weekly rehearsals to create and craft the piece, and then perform it at the end of the semester for our facility, fellow dancers in the department, and for a grade.

My concept was to use recorded text in place of music to see if audience members could made a connection between the human bodies that they saw and the words that they heard. I wanted to explore embodying the text with choreographic movement and allowed my abstract phrases to be formed from and inspired by the piece of writing I chose. Recorded my roommate Mickey narrating a expert from the book “House of Leaves.” In the section, a man is alone in the basement of a tattoo shop where he works and is all of the sudden attacked by a creature of questionable form. I chose the section of literature because it was so vivid and descriptive that it evoked scared emotions within me. I wanted that to translate in my piece. 

To do research for this project, I thought about what scares me. When I was growing up I would have the same recurring nightmare of someone breaking into our house that is out on a county road far from town and murdering different members of my family. I know this sounds horrifying but its true! It was always a different storyline but it was the same dream. I remember being so frighten walking down our long hallway at night with the different reflections of the outside lights casting wired shadows from the trees, and having multiple corners in our living room, your imagination always wondered if someone was hiding up against the wall.

Recalling these nightmares and that pure fear that you experience as a kid, I tried to tap into that when creating the piece and suggested that my dancers do the same. My soloist for the piece, Lexy, said that after rehearsal one night she actually when home and had a scary dream about the piece. She said that she was in a weird place that was a combination of her house and a creepy warehouse. She said that in the corner of the room their was a huge stain on the ceiling and it was dripping a black substance that was forming into a human figure in the corner of the room. I felt bad that my project gave her nightmares but I decided to incorporate the different descriptive aspects she gave me about her dream into the piece, even adding a water dripping effect to a certain section in the recording.