Into the Boundary Waters

by Sophie Nye

Professor Shawn Womack titled this year’s fall Dance Troupe performance , to be held Sat. Dec. 6 at 2 p.m. at Flanigan Studio Theatre, Boundary Waters. She recycled the idea from a concept of boundaries originally developed by Aemelia Tallen ’05, a student choreographer. While the concept for Tallen’s dance evolved during the rehearsal process into something entirely new, the idea of boundaries stuck with Womack.

The show will revolve around the idea. Womack poses the question: “Rather than a performance of separate works, what if we were to create a stream of danced activity, one that eddies, meanders, rushes or lies still?” Between the four dances choreographed by student choreographers, “dancers intervene between each tightly choreographed dance with improvised group choreographies and physical fits of solo activity,” according to Womack.

The creation of the dances by the four student choreographers has been a flowing, continuous process as well. Womack said, “Necessarily, what we think the dance is about changes in the rehearsal process.”

Frequently, the choreographers would start with a concept for a dance that they would then share with their dancers. The choreographers used material generated by their dancers during improv sessions to create their dances. Through the rehearsal process, their dances would transform into a different concept entirely.

Laura Langan ‘04 wanted to juxtapose a tap dancer with two barefoot dancers, but because her tap dancer was male and the other two dancers were female, the dance’s theme evolved to be about what Langan called “gender politics.”

“I thought that my original idea would be basically to manipulate this phrase and [to see] how many ways it could be manipulated.” Rachel Schousboe ’04 said of her piece, adding, “And while we’re still doing that, we’re doing it differently than I had first intended.” What she ended up with was the concept that the audience would feel as though they were sitting in the dancers’ living room, watching them dance, almost intruding on a private moment. “Progressively it will start more and more to be an actual performance as opposed to just watching someone dance in a living room,” she said.

Even with a predetermined premise for each piece, Womack and the student choreographers warned against coming to the performance with the expectation that the choreography will provide a fixed theme for the viewer.

“The power of dance is in its ambiguity,” Womack said, adding, “It honors its audience to arrive at their own associations and make their own meaning.”

Another student choreographer, Aemelia Tallen ’05, had a similar sentiment. “You don’t want whoever’s seeing it to know from the very beginning what they’re supposed to be feeling,” she said, “I think it’s much more interesting for the viewer to tell the choreographer what the piece is about because we all bring our own story to it.”

“I like to have people watch it to see how it speaks to them,” Shelby Hayhoe ’04 said, “It doesn’t have to have the same meaning at all for everybody.”