MFA Dance candidates present "Hauntings" and "Invoking Justice"

February 26, 2016 School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies

TDPS MFA Dance candidates Julia Smith and Curtis Stedge will present their thesis concert on Thursday, March 10 and Friday, March 11 at 7:30pm in the Kogod Theatre.

Julia Smith’s piece is entitled Hauntings, which she describes as a “lyric poem.” The choreography consists of a collection of portraits that explore the “half life” of a dancer, or what it means to dance for half of one’s life. What does it mean to perform at middle age, and how can dance remain a vital part of life for an older body? Her choreography plays with themes of the love, beauty, grief, and nostalgia that develop out of personal and intimate relationships. She deals with the struggles of internal and external conflicts through symbolism and metaphor, using ordinary objects to enhance the meaning of her movement. In this way, she shows but does not tell, engaging her audience with the mystery of her work.

Smith draws inspiration from music and poetry, including that of Chopin, John Keats, W.B. Yeats, and even her mother Claire, whose voice can be heard reading her own poetry as part of the choreography’s soundtrack. Smith has also collaborated with TDPS MFA Design candidate Kelly Colburn to play with different possibilities for breaking up sounds and rearranging them in ways that complement and clarify the danced movement.

Classically trained, Smith has been influenced throughout her many years of dancing by the modern dance techniques of Erick Hawkins, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and José Limón. For Hauntings, Smith has invited three professional dance artists and long-time friends—Alison Crosby, Florian Rouiller, and Bruno Augusto—who all share the experience of dancing for “half a life” in various contexts.

Curtis Stedge explores similar themes to Smith’s, but he takes a wider perspective, looking more at social and collective issues than at personal relationships. Invoking Justice is informed by Buddhist philosophy and legal theory, and he ponders duality and holism by questioning the separation between mind and body. What is reality, and how is reality manufactured by culture and society? Stedge creates a courtroom scene in order to explore the notion of “magical justice,” and he strives for balance between the stability and instability—the objectivity and subjectivity—of our judicial system through interconnected movement.

Stedge is a recent Certified Movement Analyst (CMA), and his work is unique because he uses the Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) system as a choreographic tool. While many use LMA to describe existing movement, Stedge used the detailed system to create new movement profiles for each of his characters. Each aspect of a character’s movement has been carefully selected and represents specific dynamics of the personality. His cast consists of TDPS BA and MFA Dance students, each of whom has had to hone their own natural movement styles to fit a given character.

Both Stedge and Smith describe their work as “dance theatre”—that is, dance that invokes a narrative, tells a story, and explores personal and social issues through characters. Like many artists, they struggle to resist labels, and their description of their artistic process is not dissimilar to that of the research process: they accept a label or categorization only to question it, challenge it, and break it down. Hauntings and Invoking Justice both, in their own ways, mirror the cycle of death and rebirth to ponder old questions only ask new ones.

By Kate Spanos

For more information, visit:

http://tdps.umd.edu/event/2015-2016/spring-mfa-dance-thesis-concert

Tickets are available online:

http://theclarice.umd.edu/events/2016/spring-mfa-dance-thesis-concert