Papers by Maria S O L E D A D Gillespie
How does a dancing body create and communicate meaning? My experiences as an educator and perform... more How does a dancing body create and communicate meaning? My experiences as an educator and performer in the US, Mexico, and China have provoked me to look closely at how bodies convey information that shapes language and thought. Working with international dancers, I was fascinated with the speed at which a movement becomes a part of a transnational lexicon. How does a dancer transform linguistic understanding into the intelligence of the body in performance? I was initially intrigued by the catch-22 of finding a solution when there is no rule for arranging the order of the communication of languages and the movement of communication. Is movement a language? And if it is, is each dancer’s language discrete, legible, and translatable? As I watch performing bodies dart, stare, and nest, convulse, or laugh, I am witnessing the performers translate ideas into action. As a witness, I observe and translate the performers’ actions into language. These reciprocal modes of witnessing and translation occur in dance performance. I build my thesis upon the work of performance studies scholar, Diana Taylor to examine how embodied performers create, reform, and deliver their stories. Do dancers take language and spin it through their bodies like a centrifuge or let it settle like a slow, systemic drip? At either speed, this metaphor allows me to elucidate that as we dance, we are moving archived knowledge into circulation.
Drafts by Maria S O L E D A D Gillespie
Choreographing Small Infinities, 2020
As a dancer, I locate myself in my environment through moving. My dancing practice is fort... more As a dancer, I locate myself in my environment through moving. My dancing practice is fortified by discipline and intuition, both of which are influenced by my environment, culture, and habits. Through dancing, my experience is process oriented, composed through my felt environment; consciousness is both experienced and expressed in sensation, observation, and the desire to bridge to my world. As a dancemaker, I respond to the world, form questions and inquire through the act of moving. I process and formulate responses by moving and observe meaning making by analyzing the ways bodies move. As an educator, I use collaboration as the springboard to invite others to contemplate choice-making and contribute thoughtfully to making new movements, new choices, and possibly new meanings. My final application project for Integrated Movement Studies is grounded on these three epistemological methods of knowing: sensing, inquiring, and collaborating through kinesthetic means.
This project draws from my choreographic process to conceive, create, and teach a solo dance work utilizing L/BMA theory and practices as the tools and methods for research. I utilize L/BMA methodologies for observation, notation, analysis, embodiment, and teaching to examine how the body’s use of gesture, Shape, Space, and Effort are intertwined in movement performance and meaning making. The analysis of particular moments serve as place markers for a meta-analysis of identity and gender in future research as this research and application are connected to my larger project focusing on comprehension of gender performativity in contemporary dancemaking. The scope of this paper is to focus L/BMA analysis in an overview of the dance as I observed and taught it. For now, the evocative and analytical descriptions of the dance are my abstraction of gender as felt in translating the metaphor of parthenogenesis. While this analysis of the dance’s metaphors honors my modern dance heritage, historically compelled to evoke an internal psychological experience, utilizing L/BMA theories and observation processes to apprehend exactly where and how meaning is communicated in movement is a productive application of my postmodern training. As dance scholar Susan Foster reminds us, postmodern reflexivity allows the analyst a “systematic examination of its own production” (Foster 47). Using BESS at my method for kinesthetic and metaphoric inquiry, I am able to contextualize the dance’s movements, forming a new understanding of their performative, expressive implications.
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Papers by Maria S O L E D A D Gillespie
Drafts by Maria S O L E D A D Gillespie
This project draws from my choreographic process to conceive, create, and teach a solo dance work utilizing L/BMA theory and practices as the tools and methods for research. I utilize L/BMA methodologies for observation, notation, analysis, embodiment, and teaching to examine how the body’s use of gesture, Shape, Space, and Effort are intertwined in movement performance and meaning making. The analysis of particular moments serve as place markers for a meta-analysis of identity and gender in future research as this research and application are connected to my larger project focusing on comprehension of gender performativity in contemporary dancemaking. The scope of this paper is to focus L/BMA analysis in an overview of the dance as I observed and taught it. For now, the evocative and analytical descriptions of the dance are my abstraction of gender as felt in translating the metaphor of parthenogenesis. While this analysis of the dance’s metaphors honors my modern dance heritage, historically compelled to evoke an internal psychological experience, utilizing L/BMA theories and observation processes to apprehend exactly where and how meaning is communicated in movement is a productive application of my postmodern training. As dance scholar Susan Foster reminds us, postmodern reflexivity allows the analyst a “systematic examination of its own production” (Foster 47). Using BESS at my method for kinesthetic and metaphoric inquiry, I am able to contextualize the dance’s movements, forming a new understanding of their performative, expressive implications.
This project draws from my choreographic process to conceive, create, and teach a solo dance work utilizing L/BMA theory and practices as the tools and methods for research. I utilize L/BMA methodologies for observation, notation, analysis, embodiment, and teaching to examine how the body’s use of gesture, Shape, Space, and Effort are intertwined in movement performance and meaning making. The analysis of particular moments serve as place markers for a meta-analysis of identity and gender in future research as this research and application are connected to my larger project focusing on comprehension of gender performativity in contemporary dancemaking. The scope of this paper is to focus L/BMA analysis in an overview of the dance as I observed and taught it. For now, the evocative and analytical descriptions of the dance are my abstraction of gender as felt in translating the metaphor of parthenogenesis. While this analysis of the dance’s metaphors honors my modern dance heritage, historically compelled to evoke an internal psychological experience, utilizing L/BMA theories and observation processes to apprehend exactly where and how meaning is communicated in movement is a productive application of my postmodern training. As dance scholar Susan Foster reminds us, postmodern reflexivity allows the analyst a “systematic examination of its own production” (Foster 47). Using BESS at my method for kinesthetic and metaphoric inquiry, I am able to contextualize the dance’s movements, forming a new understanding of their performative, expressive implications.