A typical student's experience transitioning out of college and into the real world is wrought with growth, nostalgia and unprecedented emotion.
The culmination of that experience will take center stage starting Feb. 19 as graduating seniors present original dance pieces in the school of Film, Dance and Theatre's Transition Projects.
Melissa Rex, artistic director for Transition Projects, said the students' pieces will explore a wide array of concepts, from the perception of gender to memory.
"(The project) is of course extremely impactful for these students, who are wrapping up their studies and looking to the next step in their journey," Rex wrote in an email. "But because of that, these works tend to really send out that same feeling to the audience. The concert is aptly titled Transitions."
Transition Projects has served as a platform for graduates to explore and share the transitional process for many years, but Rex said the program consistently evolves with each graduating class.
"It evolves because of time, experience, generational transformation and our influences around us in our culture and environment," she wrote. "Personal experiences vary greatly and are interpreted so individually about life and how it is translated and transformed through dance and the production elements."
For some students, those production elements will consist of much more than the space they take up and the movements they make. As in life, transition and transformation in this project often come to pass through different moments and materials.
Dance senior Allyson Yoder, for instance, will be bringing a single black cloth onto the stage with her to help illustrate an exploration of her Mennonite heritage and identity.
Yoder said that while her physical movement is certainly important to her performance, her relationship with the cloth and the accompanying music will serve as a much larger context for her personal exploration. It is an original track she pieced together using sounds recorded in church services.
She also said the use of the cloth has helped her confront and explore feelings of physical confinement in church.
"I think there are pieces of our identity that we carry around with us whether we acknowledge them or not, whether we work with them or not," she said. "The cloth represents part of my identity that I don’t always want to acknowledge or work with, and so having it physically and visually represented forces me to confront it."
Dance major Ashley Baker will confront a more universal experience through her performance as she explores fragments of memory and nostalgia in a piece she worked on with locally renowned choreographer Carley Conder.
Baker described her performance as an exploration of nostalgia and the reasons individuals retain specific fragments of their personal memories.
“A large image that was used as jumping off point was a piece of shattered glass,” Baker said. “Each little sliver is a part of a larger picture and put together it makes a larger picture; but not without those shatters.”
Like Yoder, Baker chose to incorporate media into her performance with the help of Conder, who chose a video that will add to Baker’s environment without distracting from her movements.
The video is based off of a painting that showed a girl looking at a large tree, an image Baker and Conder said they felt evoked a certain mystery that resonated with Baker’s message.
“It’s a snapshot of memory, but you don’t necessarily understand what the person is thinking about,” Baker said. “But you still get that feeling of nostalgia and wanting to be in a memory that may not exist anymore.”
Baker and Yoder will join dozens of other dance students on stage during the Transition Projects from Feb. 19 to 21.
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ASU graduate leads life of professional dance
Reach the reporter at celina.jimenez@asu.edu or follow @lina_lauren on Twitter.
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