Voice Memos tells the story of struggle and triumph through a compilation of voice memos that help guide the dance. In collaboration with outside research, Steven experimented with communicating choreography through scores and a variety of notation practices. Instead of letting the choreography live on paper, the work created in the studio was compiled into a showcase titled, “Voice Memos.” Each piece incorporates sounds of audio ranging from interviews to original songs to phone calls. The show focuses on the truths queer people of color face and explores the importance of connection, family and moving forward.

Dancers: Madeline Rouse, Chinaza Okafor, Sabrina Sawyer, Elisabeth Reed, Steven Vargas

Choreographer: Steven Vargas

Dancing Figures: Communicating choreography and dance through incomplete lines, shapes and symbols

While working in the studio, Steven explored how to use concepts of design to communicate dance in the two-dimensional space of the paper. My main focuses of exploration included lines, shapes and symbols. He found that the ambiguity and interpretation of the line helped the most in communicating dance and the dancers were able to find ways of looking at their bodies as interacting or incomplete lines that abstractly represent the direction of movement. He implemented acting practices such as Strasberg's technique to explore the way in which sensation and emotional memory can impact the way the movement is embodied in the dancer. By looking at previous attempts at dance notation, he built upon them to create his own choreography.

Introduction

When communicating dance, dancemakers turned to scoring methods to outline the work made on bodies. Choreographers developed ways of making movement visible in the two-dimensional space of the page, which resulted in notation practices that incorporated lines, shapes and symbols to indicate movement. For example, choreographers like Feuillet and Andrew Winghart used lines to create paths on the page that resembled the paths dancers made during the performance. In my own exploration of choreography and in an analysis of previous research on ephemerality and choreographic scoring, I discovered how employing attributes of design helps communicate choreography. I compared design practices that use shapes and lines to communicate messages and brands with the way choreographers communicate movement to dancers through dance notation. There is a whole history of incomplete images in dance notation, like in design, that provides dancers with the overall structure of the choreography. The rest is filled in by the dancers using it at that point in time, whether it be the day after the choreographer created the notation or ten years after. I am looking at dance notation as the choreographer’s tool to communicate choreography rather than an archive of movement for their own memory.