This thesis has been approved by

The Honors Tutorial College and the School of

______

Dr. Tresa Randall Director of Studies, Dance

Thesis Adviser

______

Dr. Donal Skinner

Dean, Honors Tutorial College

pillow:you:blanket : an Improvisational Dance Score Designed for a Quarantined World

______

A Thesis

Presented to

The Honors Tutorial College

Ohio University

______

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for Graduation

from the Honors Tutorial College

with the degree of

Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance

______

by

Zoe Meadows

April 2021

Meadows 2

Introduction

It was spring break of my junior year, the second week of March 2020. Two of my good friends had come home with me to visit my hometown, a suburb of Chicago, and we were having fun exploring the Windy City. We attended a performance of Alvin Ailey’s dance Revelations, where we cried, cheered, and clapped alongside three thousand other people. At the National

Museum of Mexican Art, we touched the intricate textile work displayed there. We crammed into a loaded elevator to ride to the top of the John Hancock Building to see the vast Chicago skyline. And then, everything changed; suddenly, the country was in lockdown. I learned that I was going to be staying home for much longer than I expected, as people everywhere were sheltering in place. Abruptly, almost everything I had spent the previous week doing was virtually impossible.

The quarantine and self-isolation experience as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic was and still is disrupting for the vast majority of people. Americans were initially instructed to only leave their house for essential purposes; no more going to restaurants, to school, or in some cases, to work. Currently, when someone does leave their home, they have to stay at least six feet away from any other person and wear a mask. The lockdown caused people to lose their jobs, be separated from loved ones, and more. As a dancer, I felt uniquely affected, as it seemed that my discipline had never been more irrelevant. Two cornerstones of my discipline, choreographing with a community and performing in front of an audience, now seemed impossible.

I wanted to create a dance that directly responded to the new set of parameters of quarantine and self-isolation. This wish led me to the idea of creating a site-inspired improvisational score for my undergraduate thesis project. Over the school year, I created such a score called pillow:you:blanket Dances, inspired by my experience of my bedroom. After the

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COVID-19 lockdown, my bedroom suddenly became a defining feature of my everyday life, the place where I studied, danced, ate, and virtually hung out with friends. Due to the pandemic, my bedroom was one of the few places I could go, but no one else could share that space with me. pillow:you:blanket Dances, an experiential work based around my bedroom and designed to be easily accessible for dancers all over the world, attempts to overcome the spatial divide caused by quarantine and social distancing.

pillow:you:blanket Dances is an audiovisual score for dancing with a pillow and a blanket. It consists of a series of prompts that are conveyed through visual aids, a written score, and an audio recording, and it invites participants to dance with two inanimate objects, a pillow and a blanket. The audio recording provides an original soundscape that is gentle yet playful; it contains the spoken instructions as well as ambient sounds. A postcard acts as a visual aid to the score and describes my experience of being in my bedroom. This emphasizes the personal and spatial nature of the score and provides an example of the kinds of observations that are prompted by the work. The visual and auditory elements of the score act in harmony to lead dancers through an explorative designed to provoke feelings of awareness, playfulness, and nostalgia as participants interact with a pillow and blanket.

To create pillow:you:blanket Dances, I drew from historic artists and personal experiences through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic to create a unique compositional structure. The score I created is vastly different from what I initially imagined, as my ideas were refined through my creative process. Throughout the project, I drew from various artists including Remy Charlip, Anna Halprin, and others whose ideas and artistic work continually informed and inspired my artistic decisions and goals. Through the act of improvising, reading,

Meadows 4 and creating, I produced an improvisational score, uniquely designed in response to quarantine for dancers going through it themselves.

Initial Inspiration

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, dancers could not be together in a dance studio; rather, they had to turn to dancing at home, a process that is challenging and can even be dangerous. Dancing at home is a drastically different experience from dancing at a studio.

Homes are cluttered with furniture, knick-knacks, pets, and people who aren’t interested in being danced around! Homes do not provide the high ceilings and smooth floors that dancers need to leap and turn. At the height of quarantine, dancers were no longer able to touch each other or even share a space together as they moved, a core element of the dance experience. Moving in their homes, dancers were adapting to new spaces and a new method of dancing, as classes and rehearsals were increasingly hosted online.

I spent much of the spring and summer of 2020 trying to adapt to the new world of virtual and hybrid dance classes, rehearsals, and performances. Virtual dance is challenging for many reasons. Dance takes place in three-dimensional space, making it difficult to show or teach on a two-dimensional TV, phone, or computer screen. Oftentimes, these screens show a mediated human being inside of a small box or rectangle. Additionally, cameras confuse directionality, as they act like a mirror reflecting the recorded dancer's right side onto the viewer’s left side. Lastly, the dance being performed or taught is inside a different space than that of the viewer. All of these elements combine to make virtual dance a vastly different experience than in-person dance, although virtual dance class and concert structures remained largely the same as in-person ones.

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As virtual dance classes and concerts continued, I was inspired to create a method of dance designed for home spaces, rather than squeezing past models of dance to fit into the

COVID-safe mold of my living room. I wanted to create an artistic piece responding to the limitations posed by quarantine, and in this way discover creative innovations, unthought-of in unhindered situations. Perhaps I could send my space, the thing which so encapsulated and infused my everyday experience, to others. By doing so, I could push the dance form, rather than creating coping mechanisms modeled by other virtual dance classes and performances. To re- invent dance in this way, I needed to first define for myself what makes dance valuable.

I believe that no artistic discipline reintroduces us to our bodies and environment as well as dance. Dancers feel, hear, and see their environment while moving, enhancing the relationship between senses and setting. Dance invites us to experience our surroundings in a new way via our senses. Paying special attention to our environment and how we experience it re-awakens parts of our body as we engage our skin, eyes, ears, kinesthesia, and more. A dancer’s sensory experience of their world is a bodily knowledge that also attunes them to themselves. Such knowledge is useful in a time when I, a dancer, feel so alienated and disoriented. When I began to question how dance could be valuable in quarantine, my inquiries revealed how much dance allows me to understand my place in the world, literally and figuratively.

Artistic Methods and Influences:

Site-Related Dance

With this rediscovered interest in the relationship between a dancer and their environment, I began to explore site-specific dance, a genre of dance that focuses especially on the place where it is performed. The term “site-specific dance” is a broad one, and as the field

Meadows 6 continues to adapt, codified language is yet to emerge. Victoria Hunter defines site-specific dance as “dance performance created in response to and performed in a certain site or location”

(“Embodying the Site” 367). According to this definition, the creative process takes place in the same space as the performance.

As I learned more about site-specific dance in my initial thesis research, I began to question if the parameters of site-specificity fit my project or my interests. I wanted to explore my bedroom, a specific site, as part of my thesis project, but for many reasons, it didn’t seem viable for me to perform a choreographed routine in my bedroom. I began searching for alternative theories and artistic works relating to site and place.

Miwon Kwon’s article “One Place After Another: Notes on Site-Specificity” offered another definition of site-specific art for me to consider. Kwon argues that the visual art field has redefined the term site so that it no longer applies to just the physical location but also the sociopolitical context of the work. Kwon states that when creating site-specific pieces, visual artists are increasingly considering the history, race, class, and more of the neighborhood where the work is being created and are responding to these cultural elements like the site’s material components. Her article opened my eyes, leading me to question my assumptions about site- specificity. Kwon’s theory presented an alternative way for me to use site in my thesis; I could create work centered around the identity of my room, not its physical presence. Working with an conception of my room would allow my artistic work to be situated in any place, while still being site-related. However, due to the value I place on embodiment as defined in phenomenology, I decided I wanted the physical reality of my bedroom to play an important role in my work.

I felt like Goldilocks, as I bounced between these two definitions of site-specificity - the first felt too rooted to a physical location, the second felt too untrue to my research interests. At

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“just right” sat Earthwork sculptor Robert Smithson’s Theory of Nonsites. Smithson, who created sculptures and writings in the 1960s and 1970s, describes Non-sites like this: “[t]he

Nonsite (an indoor earthwork) is a three-dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site” (364). Nonsites are representative of an abstraction of a site, depicting some essence of the place they symbolize. Smithson contends that when viewing a Nonsite, usually a geometric arrangement of stones in boxes, you are visiting a reality of the actual site without being in its physical location. Smithson did not consider his work site-specific, although it was still heavily shaped by a specific physical location and expressing something about the site. As Smithson abstracted a site and presented it in other places, I thought I could extract a part of my bedroom, where I spend the majority of time after the pandemic and “transport” it somewhere else.

Similar to Smithson’s work, dancer-choreographers Eiko & Koma offer an example of that is adjacent to site-specific work. Their pieces which link disparate places that have similar functions, history, or some other conceptual similarities was inspiring to me. In

Eiko & Koma’s work, they abstract sites to find commonalities between geographically separated people and places. When describing their piece River, which was performed in seven different bodies of water, Eiko Otake remarks, “In the end, what we like to bring to the audience is the very essence of the river; we show what connects one river to another river—water that runs. . . We do start by addressing the specifics of the place, but the darkness of the night usually brings out the core of the place, so that River X becomes all rivers” (qtd. in Kloetzel 11). In Eiko

& Koma’s process, they look at a variety of sites and find elements that are true of each place.

Their work reveals that a site can be abstracted through dance, as Smithson does through sculpture.

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I decided it would be best for me to abstract my site, my bedroom, rather than performing my work in my space or seek to situate (or site) my work in a socio-political narrative.

Abstracting my bedroom spoke best to my artistic values and intentions for my thesis project. I abstracted my experience of my bedroom, finding what themes exemplified how I perceive this space and represent those themes. To accomplish this, I turned to the method of dance improvisation.

Improvisation

In the simplest definition, dance improvisation involves generating movement in the moment. Improvisation can appear in many forms or contexts, such as a krump dance battle, a class, or during a performance where a dancer slips and must cover their mistake.

Seasoned improvisers train themselves to listen to their body’s desires and responses regularly, fine-tuning their body awareness and reflexes. My practice of improvisation is shaped by figureheads of the movement such as Deborah Hay, , and Trisha

Brown, as well as practitioner and scholar Kent De Spain. Each of these artists has created their own approaches and philosophies about dance improvisation, but they all view improvisation as a practice that relates the mind and the body in a unique way. De Spain says, “Improvisation is a form of research, a way of peering into the completely natural system that is the human being. It is, in a sense, another way of ‘thinking,’ but one that produces ideas impossible to conceive in stillness” (qtd. in De Spain, Cutting Edge of Awareness 27). When a dancer improvises, they discover thoughts and concepts about themselves, their body, and their environment only accessible by moving. Improvisation is not only a physical exercise but also a unique approach to embodiment.

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Tutorials that I took in dance improvisation and phenomenology, which both focused on embodiment and philosophical approaches to physical experience, shaped the creative process I employed in my thesis project. Through a tutorial in phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that examines things as they appear in an individual's experience and how people experience those things, I began to be interested in the study of embodiment. Among the phenomenological texts I read was Drew Leder's The Absent Body, which critiques Cartesian dualism, the idea that the mind and body are separate entities. A later tutorial in dance improvisation with fellow student

Emma Little furthered my understanding of phenomenology and its application to the dance field. In this tutorial, I read about artists like Kent De Spain who examine the intimate relationship between the mind and the body, challenging Cartesian dualism through the study of dance improvisation. Additionally, through dance improvisation, I applied phenomenological theory as I focused on experiencing my environment through my senses, reacting to that sensory input through my body, and then describing my bodily response through concrete language. In this way, phenomenology was foundational in my approach to improvisation, as it led me to see improvisation as a tool to analyze myself and my environment.

In the field of improvisation, the dancer’s environment and space around them can be viewed as a resource and collaborator. Pioneer improviser and dance visionary Anna Halprin says that while improvising, “You are not an object in space. You are a part of space” (qtd. in De

Spain, Landscape of the Now 109). As I improvise, the space I’m dancing in is often my greatest inspiration and partner. The bodily experience of moving through a place forms an epistemology, blending how I perceive myself with how I perceive my physical space (Munjee, “Embodied

Place” 2). When I see, touch, smell a place as I improvise within it, I gain a deeper understanding of the space than they would by just thinking about it or hearing it described. When “stuck,” with

Meadows 10 no movement coming, I can call on the space, mimicking aesthetic elements with my body, holding my body in unusual spatial relationships, and more. At the same time, the performance space is already shaping my body’s actions, as my body intuitively reacts to the site. As I practice embodiment through improvisation, my “body becomes porous, open, and receptive,” so that my surroundings can be absorbed at a fundamental level (Hunter, “Embodying the Site”

368). Improvisation is the tool with which I explore embodiment, and I used it to explore my bedroom and its attributes for my thesis project.

Like play, improvisation is a method to investigate not only ourselves but also our relation to the world around us through movement. Choreographer Susan Rethorst says “Play is this very profound thing that kids do. Their curiosity about the nature of things, the world, and their place in it - that’s a profound investigation” (qtd. in Burke, “Teacher’s Wisdom”). By playing, we interrogate the capabilities of our environment and ourselves. Often, when we play as children, we use physicality to explore imaginary worlds and narratives, bridging the gap between the seen and unseen. Similarly, improvisation is a powerful tool to investigate the connections and borders between ourselves and our world.

Comparing improvisation to play is an integral part of my approach to the pillow:you:blanket Dances score. Viewing improvisation as play is a helpful metaphor that fosters in-the-moment experimentation and can lessen the fear of failure while dancing. My improvisational score is meant to be experiential and open-ended, allowing opportunities for the dancers to tune in with themselves and their objects. Dancers can feel relaxed when I compare the improvisation to play because they don’t feel like the score is an activity trying to achieve a virtuosic objective. Rather, their creative, experimental side is encouraged. Play is necessary for any child to grow and develop as they relate themselves to the external world, yet can also be

Meadows 11 silly and imaginative. I seek to do the same with my improvisational score, leading participants through a unique play experience as they foster connections between themselves and their surroundings.

Improvisation is a powerful tool that allows dancers to gain a better understanding of themselves and their environment. As I seek to share my experience of my space with other people, it seemed the best form of dance to do just that because of its unique focus on embodiment. Various scholars, improvisers, and choreographers, such as Kent de Spain, Anna

Halprin, and Susan Rethorst, have shaped my belief that improvisational dance is a tool to investigate the self in relation to its environment. Through my experience of their work, as well as my own experiences improvising, I was able to form a methodology of improvisation which was integral in the development of pillow:you:blanket Dances, my undergraduate thesis project.

Scores

After improvising, I used my discoveries to create a dance score, inspired by Remy

Charlip and Anna Halprin’s use of scores for dance dissemination. Architect and dancer duo

Lawrence and Anna Halprin describe scores as a “symbolization of process,” concrete records of an ephemeral occurrence of actions (Halprin 40). Dance scores come in many different forms, from a list of descriptive words meant to be interpreted loosely, to a Labanotation score, a codified collection of symbols which represent movement similar to how notes represent sound. The Halprins would say that a grocery shopping list is a score - it is an artifact that documents a series of actions that can be repeated. No matter the form they take, scores capture and communicate an artistic process so that it can be shared with others (Halprin 40). Scores record actions and occurrences and act as a form of exchange so others can enact those actions.

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Scores were an especially appealing medium for me during the COVID-19 pandemic. By creating a score, I overcame spatial divides non-virtually. Scores allow dance to be shared across space, something I needed to do when I was quarantined. Additionally, by creating a dance score, I created a dance without an audience, necessary when gatherings of more than ten people were prohibited. However, creating a score also had artistic merit, as I created an experience in which the dancers have agency, becoming active participants in the work instead of passive viewers. In this way, the score recipients form their own creative experiences, as I blur the line between choreographer and viewer. In a time of digital saturation, sharing dance away from a screen was also artistically appealing to me. A score could be an alternative to the myriad of virtual dance classes and concerts, making it stand out as unique and original. For these reasons,

I developed a dance score during and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

To create a dance score for a quarantined world, I was especially drawn to the work of

Remy Charlip, a choreographer whose Air Mail Dances were also created during a quarantine and model one way to share dance across geographic space. In 1971 while quarantining in

Australia, Charlip created his first of many pictorial dance scores, sending drawings inspired by images on French postcards and sign language to dancer Nancy Lewis through the mail (Stark

Smith 24). He continued to create what he later called Air Mail Dances, drawing sketch-like outlines of poses and sending them to dancers, who then decided what the transition between the poses should be. In some Air Mail Dances, dancers are asked to do impossible things, for instance, having an arm turning into a cloud; these playful instructions force dancers to choreograph distinctive solutions. Charlip’s Air Mail Dances are an imaginative approach to dance scores that travel to and are performed at different sites.

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During my junior year, I recreated Charlip’s Air Mail Dance “Garden Lilacs'' as part of a course on the history of modern and postmodern dance. Personally enacting Charlip’s score gave me an invaluable understanding of his work and the use of scores. At first impression, Air Mail

Dances seem simple to enact, with little room for creative expression. For “Garden Lilacs,” each position is depicted in detail, and it even has some written instructions. Yet, when my classmate and I enacted the score, we discovered how much it encouraged creative decision-making.

Charlip wasn’t concerned that his choreography was recreated exactly; he left it up to the dancers’ creativity and interpretation (Stark Smith 27). I felt that I was creating in partnership with Charlip, using my artistic voice to express his vision.

Perhaps one of the reasons Charlip’s Air Mail Dances had such a profound influence on me was because I was able to perform and contribute to the work myself. Scores are artistic medium meant to share the experience of doing something. As a dancer, the thing I love most about dance isn’t watching other dancers - it’s moving around myself! The feeling of dancing is something I want to share with an audience as an artistic work. In much dance choreography, there is a clear distinction between who is watching and who is moving. Audiences participate in the artistic process by witnessing and receiving completed work. Scores are a powerful creative tool that interrupts this established dynamic between the artists and the audience. Scores are not created for audience members, but for participants; they enable others to move, to experience something new. Through scores, dancers are empowered to finalize an artistic work by becoming participants and creators themselves. I, myself, was able to experience the feeling of dancing when I recreated one of Charlip’s Air Mail Dances.

Another element I found valuable about scores was that I was able to experience Remy

Charlip’s work regardless of time or place. This is a unique and powerful attribute of all scores;

Meadows 14 think about one of the most common forms of a score: sheet music. Today, while sitting at a piano in Ohio, I can play one of Chopin’s nocturnes composed around 1830 in Paris. I can share in a creative experience that countless others, regardless of where they were born, have also undertaken. What a beautiful tool to use in this time of extreme isolation! The world needs creative ways to overcome isolation and spatial barriers, as COVID safety protocols maintain travel bans and to a smaller extent, social distancing. More and more, we have turned to virtual spaces to overcome physical separation. In the dance world, many exciting things are emerging through catalyzed use of technology, but the saturation of virtual classes and concerts can be overwhelming and exhausting. Many dancers are simply no longer interested in virtual dance, and see it as a pale version of live performance and class. Scores provide an alternative option to these technological solutions.

Choreographer Anna Halprin’s work points to another attribute of scores; she uses them as a tool to draw inspiration from lived experience. Like many postmodern artists, Halprin was interested in breaking down the separation between life and art; however, she was particularly interested in using dance improvisation and scores as tools to understand everyday life and vice versa. She developed “methods, roadmaps, so this very personal material could be developed as art so that as your life experience deepened your art experience would expand and as your art expression expanded this, in turn, could deepen your life experience.” (Trott, 07:38-08:01).

These methods and roadmaps can be described as dance scores, tools to loosely recreate certain aspects of improvisational experiences. Each time these improvisational scores were repeated, dancers would be able to intensify the experience, learning more about the dance and themselves

(Ross, 36). For Halprin, dancing using a score was not an isolated practice but a ritual that transformed individuals' lives.

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Anna Halprin’s use of improvisation and scores was foundational to my process as I created pillow:you:blanket scores. Following a series of dance scores, I improvised in my room and used my improvisational observations to distill my experience of my space. This is similar to how Halprin described her use of scores, as a way to better understand facets of her and her dancers’ lives. Her focus on experientiality itself is very important in my thesis project. It can be tempting to compare my score to meditation or some other sort of therapeutic exercise; however, my score is an artistic work that is intentionally focused on individuals attuning themselves to their lived experience. My inspiration for the score I developed came directly from my reality of living quarantined in my bedroom and my attempts to recreate that experience for others.

The score I created, Pillow:you:blanket Dances, has three facets: an audio component, a visual component, and two objects. The visual component introduces the work, like a choreographer introducing themselves and their project’s theme to their dancers. The audio component consists of me reading a series of prompts to instruct the dancers, while the pillow and blanket influence the dancers’ movement as they enact the score. Pillow:you:blanket Dances is improvisational, designed to foster exploration and creativity. It is not a strict set of guidelines designed to be followed to the letter or like some sort of tricky dance riddle. These three elements, a postcard, a recording of my voice overlaid with music, and two objects form a dance score of me experiencing my room, accessible from any location.

The Use of Objects

Two objects, a pillow and a blanket, play an important role in the pillow:you:blanket

Dances score. I have already touched on two artists, Remy Charlip and Robert Smithson, who use objects in their artistic work and are key figures inspiring my thesis project. These artists, as

Meadows 16 well as Alwin Nikolais, informed the creation of pillow:you:blanket Dances and my choice to use objects in the work. In the score, objects serve as both a partner to the dancer as well as a representation of my own space.

Sculptor Robert Smithson’s Nonsites informed how I use objects in pillow:you:blanket

Dances. In Nonsites, Robert Smithson used objects to represent themes of different places, forming sculptures that often consisted of rocks in boxes. His sculptures looked nothing like the places he was representing, yet something was distinct about the objects he chose in his work to represent a place. I was intrigued about using objects to represent an environment - it is much easier to send an object through the mail than a place! In my initial ideas, I wanted to create something called Space Capsules, similar to time capsules, which would use a collection of objects to represent a location. However, I didn’t know how to translate how Smithson used objects into a dance.

I experimented with different modes of using objects in dance. Initially, I created lists of objects that appeared in my first . Playing with game structure, I set up objects all around my room. Each object acted as a space on a board game, triggering an action reliant on what the object itself was. For example, I would travel over to some tinsel, prompting me to move my spine. Then, I would move over to a carpet square, meaning I had to hop. When I reached a pile of clothes, I would have to put them all on, and so on. Yet, when I did the score, I found it overwhelming - even I, the creator of the score, couldn’t remember what actions were cued by what objects. I attempted a new iteration, experimenting with the idea of postmodern defamiliarization. I created a version of the score where I had to get dressed, as you often do in your bedroom, but I put on a variety of objects in unusual ways. I was also unsatisfied with this

Meadows 17 version of the score, as it felt like movement was not playing a prevalent role. I was still searching for a method to integrate dance with objects that represented my bedroom.

After dwelling on this question, thinking almost obsessively about it, I had a eureka moment. I realized that the perfect objects to represent my room would be a pillow and a blanket.

The wide collection of objects I had collected from around my room had no particular ties to the space, but a pillow and a blanket get to the heart of what a bedroom is - a room for a bed. I started improvising with these objects, and it was from this point that I finalized my score.

My dance training, especially my studies of dance composition, informed my choices as I improvised with the objects. Choreographer Alwin Nikolais has history at Ohio University.

Gladys Bailin-Stern, former Director of the School of Dance, was one of Nikolais’ original company members, and the Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Collection is located in Ohio

University’s Alden Library. Nikolais is not only an important part of my dance heritage, but I have also studied his work closely. In fact, I was taking a tutorial investigating how Nikolais utilized objects in his choreographic work when COVID struck. I found that Nikolais’ work challenged many of my assumptions about using props. For example, before this tutorial, I believed that a prop must always be manipulated by a human body. Nikolais showed me, especially through his work Kites, that the reverse is also true—a prop can manipulate a human body, and that there is little distinction between object and dancer. Nikolais’ work redefines the relationship between dancer and object, which he expresses in his theory of decentralization. For him, decentralization means that the dancer is not the main focus of the choreography, but everything around them as well, so that the dancer finds themselves “a contributing member rather than a dominating dweller. Space became more than just a hole in which to kick or spin about; it evolved into an architecturally fluid companion,” (Nikolais 11). I utilized Nikolais’

Meadows 18 theory of decentralization when manipulating objects in my pillow:you:blanket Dances, letting them guide my movement and choices.

As I improvised with the pillow and the blanket, I let them direct my actions, as if they were a partner, continually deepening our relationship. In this way, I was dancing and the objects were dancing. Using Nikolais’ theory of decentralization, I incorporated objects into my work by treating my objects as equals, letting them guide my body’s actions. Dancing with the pillow and the blanket, two objects which I believe encapsulate the identity of my room, dancers can experience new realities as the pillow and blanket inform their movements.

Together, the approaches and philosophies of these various artists, including Alwin

Nikolais, Anna Halprin, Remy Charlip, Robert Smithson, and Eiko & Koma inform my thesis project. Like Eiko & Koma or Robert Smithson, I abstracted a site (my bedroom) so that somehow, a part of the space is shared. Remy Charlip demonstrates that scores are a proven method of sending dance through space and time. But how did I translate my site abstraction into a dance score? Through improvisation, I formed an embodied knowledge of my space, as Anna

Halprin does in her work. Drawing on this process, I found movement themes that exemplified the core of my space. My score codified my improvisational interactions with a pillow and blanket, as I danced with them in the way Nikolais described. By creating a score, I created living documentation of my improvisations that could be sent to others to enact. Without my knowledge of all the artists I’ve described previously it is doubtful my pillow:you:blanket score would exist.

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Process And Methods

Artistic processes are rarely simple and straightforward. Projects evolve, intentions change, and goals are reimagined. In my creative practice, it is through this process that I find the meaning, theme, or purpose of the work I am making. The same is true for my undergraduate thesis project. My process was a winding road with many dead ends and diverging paths, but I did eventually reach my destination. Too often in the dance field, audiences only see the final product, without any acknowledgment of the art-making that happened in the creation of the completed dance. In the section that follows, I will draw the curtain back to reveal my entire artistic process and methods I employed in the creation of the pillow:you:blanket score.

When beginning my thesis project, I planned to create my own compositional structure, culminating with scores called Space Capsules, which I would send to other dancers. I envisioned that the Space Capsules would consist of everyday objects, visual art, and written prompts that would share my experience of one place with someone in another place. They would capture a specific space in the same way a time capsule might capture a specific time. I intended to modify the site-adaptive choreographic process in my work by finding common themes between a variety of bedrooms and coalescing my observations. When the capsules were complete, I planned to mail them to other artists so that they could enliven their relationships with their current spaces by choreographing. Although the details of how I created this compositional structure shifted, I maintained the same intention to create my own improvisational score that shares dance across space.

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Exploring My Room

I began creating the score by exploring my room through improvisation by using prompts from the book A Widening Field; Journeys in Body and Imagination by Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay. I improvised in my room in many different internal and external states, including at night, in the morning, in the afternoon, when I was sleepy, when I was energized, when I wanted to dance, and when all I wanted to do was leave that room. After each improvisation, I would document my experience by writing about what movement occurred, what I noticed, and what sensations arose. Through observing my space while moving, I started to discover themes I was interested in articulating in my score.

Several things became apparent to me through these improvisations. I regained a sensory awareness of my room through this process, noticing details about my space through touching, listening, and looking at it. Drawing from my notes, at one moment I gripped the carpet with my toes, “noticing that parts of my carpet are squished down, while other parts are fluffy. The carpet is a curious combination of scratchy and soft.” I felt the “cool breeze on my skin… causing the green cord of my blinds to shimmer back and forth.” I heard “the whirring growling of my refrigerator.” By improvising, I noticed the unique sensory details of my bedroom which would later inspire my score.

I also explored the spaces over and under objects during these improvisations. I found myself attracted to the “underneath” places of my room: under my bed, desk, or chair. These areas, places I would not normally move, seemed mysterious and were often confining. This caused me to move in unusual and exciting ways, cramming my body in on itself, sticking limbs out at odd angles, and balancing as I was squished in between two points. When I was on top of my furniture, I was able to look down at my room and see it from a new vantage point. I was

Meadows 21 experiencing my space in a completely new way, breaking up monotony through moving over and under my furniture.

Through such explorations I discovered impactful things about myself and my relationship to my space. I wanted to create opportunities for others to do the same. During one improvisation, I was laying in my room, letting my body sink into the carpet. I had my eyes closed, trying to focus on senses like touch and hearing. Every time I heard a new noise it would elicit a strong bodily response. I wrote “when I… hear a sound I want to move away or get a better look at it. I don’t want to go towards it.” I was constantly fighting an urge to flinch away.

Since coming back to school after the COVID-19 pandemic, I had spent the majority of my time alone in my room. Yet, I had not explored what that large change in my daily habits had evoked for me emotionally and physically. Easily startled and constantly recoiling, my body had adapted patterns of fear. I realized that others could discover important things about themselves and their spaces if I created an improvisational experience that allowed them to attune with their senses.

These practice-as-research improvisations in my room generated the material for my dance score. It took several attempts to create a version of the pillow:you:blanket score that achieved my goals and was clear and meaningful to participants. Throughout my process, I drew from the artists I described previously, Anna Halprin and Remy Charlip, to design a score format. In the end, I created the final iteration of pillow:you:blanket Dances which consists of an audio component supported by a visual aid and written text.

Creating the Score Text

The core of pillow:you:blanket Dances is the score’s text, which relays the instructions for dancers to listen and respond to as they dance. Writing the text, I sought to create clear and

Meadows 22 precise prompting language to so that dancers wouldn’t be confused or lost. However, I also sought to write open-ended prompts, so that dancers could have their own unique responses as they danced. I strived to use language that encourages action, guiding the dancers' impulses and movement. Such goals shaped how I wrote the text that underlies the pillow:you:blanket Dances score.

To begin the process of creating the score’s text, I drew from my own improvisations in my room and with the pillow and blanket. I noted themes from my earlier improvisations, like going over and under the pillow and blanket. Additionally, I improvised freely with the pillow and the blanket and wrote down everything that occurred. This initial list consisted of short hand notes that reminded me of the actions I had performed. To draw on the Halprin’s, this version of the score was like a grocery list, a document that reminded me of all the actions I had completed so that I could repeat them. Gradually, I started to simplify and formalize that list, using descriptive action words, like “bounce” or “drop,” that would prompt diverse actions from other dancers. Each phrase I wrote was either a question or a command, calling the participant to action. After sending this version to dance students and faculty for feedback, I modified the text, paying special attention to its beginning and ending. By the end of February, I had a completed version of the text and was ready to record it.

Creating the Audio Component

One element of the finalized score is an audio recording of me speaking instructional prompts backed by a gentle synthesizer soundscape composed by fellow HTC student Nate Sahr.

I decided to create the audio so that dancers could easily respond to the prompts as they were given, rather than remembering them as they danced or pausing to check a written text. Before

Meadows 23 creating the final audio recording, I finalized the language I would use for the improvisational prompts. Then I collaborated with Nate to create the sound that would accompany the score.

Lastly, I continued to tweak different elements of the score to finalize execution details.

HTC Media student Nate Sahr recorded my vocals over a series of two recording sessions. In each recording session, we recorded three takes of my reading the score text and then listened through each take. Together, we chose tracks where my speech was clear and natural with no background noise, and Nate assembled each audio clip to form the recorded score. After listening to this version, my thesis advisor Tresa Randall suggested I move as I recorded my vocals, using the natural gestures of my body so that I would sound less formal and more at ease.

Nate and I had one last recording session, and this time I used movements of my body to emphasize my words, such as dropping a little when I said “fall.” Adding movement as I spoke made my voice more inviting, more playful, and less formal —more like my natural self! After recording the vocals, Nate and I were ready to begin developing the soundscape to accompany my voice.

Developing a sound to accompany my vocals was an integral part of making the score.

Nate and I went through several versions to achieve the successful and final version of this soundscape. Originally, I knew I wanted sound between the long pauses in my speech. I needed long pauses to give dancers time to respond to my prompts; however, I did not want them worrying that something was wrong with the audio file because there was a long period of silence. Any type of sound that accompanied the score would impact the dancers’ movement significantly, so it was important to create a sound that supported the intentions of the score.

I told Nate I wanted an audio track that was calming, relaxing, and inviting. After discussing my thesis concept with him, we agreed the score should also incorporate some of the

Meadows 24 sounds I heard in my improvisations. Nate created an ambient, dreamy synth soundscape infused with faint sounds like a refrigerator humming and creaky footsteps. The musical composition

Nate created incorporated noises that could be heard in my bedroom and created a relaxed mood.

This first version of the score soundscape gave dancers a sleepy feeling. The sound’s ambiance and droning caused them to feel as if they were meditating, not dancing, through the movement. After listening through the audio and receiving feedback, I decided it needed an element of playfulness. The repetition of the music was in danger of lulling the dancers to sleep when I hoped they would be exploratory and engaged with their objects. After sharing this feedback with Nate, he created the final iteration of the score by adding percussive marimba elements that gradually incorporate themselves with more complex synthesizer chords to make the soundscape more playful and less repetitive. This final iteration of the audio is playful, imaginative, and calm, supporting the rest of the pillow:you:blanket Dances score’s theme.

Creating the Visual Component

In addition to the audio element, I created a visual element as part of pillow:you:blanket

Dances, which ultimately is a note written on the back of a postcard. I originally intended that the visual component would serve participants by providing an overview of the score so that they could feel at ease before beginning this new experience. However, after receiving feedback, I realized the score as a whole didn’t match my intentions. Participants didn’t realize that pillow:you:blanket Dances was sharing my experience of my bedroom. I decided to create a visual aid to emphasize that I was sending pillow:you:blanket Dances as an expression of my room for others to experience. Ultimately, separate from the visual component, I included written text on the website as an overview and reference to the score’s prompt. To supplement this text

Meadows 25 and the audio component, I created a note written on the back of a postcard, writing from my bedroom as if it were a vacation destination.

Before creating the postcard, I made a visual element of the score that merely showed the text of pillow:you:blanket Dances in intriguing ways. I wrote the text in my journal, spacing out the prompts by utilizing the white spaces on the page as poets do. I played around with the shape and weight of the letters, for instance dropping the word “falls” vertically down the page or pressing hard into my pencil as I wrote the word “weight.” After achieving a visually interesting layout of the text, I scanned it into a digital format. By scanning a physical image I was attempting to abstract the image, just as I had abstracted my bedroom. In the same way I transformed my bedroom into two objects and a dance score, as I hoped to transform a physical object (my written score) into a virtual one (the scan of it).

After receiving feedback about that scanned image, I clarified my intentions for the pillow:you:blanket Dances as a whole and the visual component. Rather than focusing on the translation of physical spaces into virtual ones, I wanted to focus on the relational aspect of the score. I could more clearly communicate that the score is an expression of my space designed for others to experience by creating a visual aid to accompany the score. I decided to include the text of the score on the pillow:you:blanket Dances’ website alongside the new visual aid.

The final version of the visual aid is a personal note written on the back of a postcard. It complements the audio version, as they work together to create an inviting and playful experiential dance work. The note is written with a personal tone, as a friend to a friend, and describes my room and my experience of it while quarantining. The address states line by line,

“Dancers Everywhere/ Covid-19 Quarantine Location/ or any other place you feel like going.”

The concept of sending a postcard from your room as if it’s a special location is quirky yet

Meadows 26 thought-provoking. It adds an element of my personality to the score, revealing its relational nature. Because the note is on a postcard, it emphasizes the importance of location, which is vital in my project. This final iteration of the pillow:you:blanket Dances’ visual component incorporates key elements of the thesis project: play, space, and experientiality.

Sharing pillow:you:blanket Dances

Sharing pillow:you:blanket Dances throughout all its steps and iterations with others for feedback and criticism was an important part of creating the final iteration. Through discussing my score with others, I better understood what it was accomplishing and what it was lacking.

Sharing my work with a group of other people was fulfilling, as I got to see my work in action, and gave me creative fuel to continue the project. It also allowed my peers, fellow School of

Dance students, to experience my project and get a glimpse of what doing a large-scale project like this thesis could look like for them.

To accomplish this, I hosted a virtual event, pillow:you:blanket Dances Improvisation

Event, on Zoom while I was still developing this project. This event was a pilot of my final score and serves as an example of how the score can be shared. I invited individuals from Ohio

University’s School of Dance as well as some community members to the event. After an introduction to the project, I asked everyone to turn off their cameras as I played the score audio, and we all enacted the score together in real-time. Next, I asked the participants a series of questions, both phenomenological ones asking about the participants’ experience as well as some directly asking for feedback. Through this event, I was able to see how participants could enact the score alone at home, while also sharing the experience with a community of other dancers.

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Another way I shared pillow:you:blanket Dances was by creating a website that hosts the score. After applying for the HTC Dean’s fund, I was able to purchase a Squarespace website and domain, which made it easy to create a functional and appealing website. I commissioned

Moss Nash, an HTC student, to create a banner image for the website. Nash’s loose, fluid illustrations encapsulate movement on a page beautifully, and their playful, imaginative work seemed a natural fit for my project. Nash created a collage of drawings depicting people, pillows, blankets, and mountainscapes in a 1970’s inspired color palette. The drawing rests at the top of each of the website pages, of which there are four: a homepage, an about page, a contact page, and a submissions page. When people visit the website, they can immediately see the visual score and play the score audio. If they choose, they can use the contact page to send a submission, which consists of language describing where they performed the score and an image of their pillow and blanket. All of these submissions are posted on the “Submissions” page, so others can see who performed the score and where, creating a sense of community. The “About” page summarizes my intentions, inspirations, and process of creating the score, as well as hosting the link to access my full thesis paper. Through this website, people can discover my score or I can send it directly to individuals and institutions, so that pillow:you:blanket Dances can be explored and performed.

Additionally, I adapted pillow:you:blanket Dances, called pillow:you:blanket Dances (a version) to be performed for an audience as part of the “Spring Senior Portfolio Works Walk-

Through Concert.” As part of the concert, a shortened version of the score was performed by

Emma J. Little and Elyse Kassa, who enacted the score on grassy spaces outside of McCracken

Hall while wearing matching pajama sets. I encouraged the dancers to interact with each other as well as their objects and suggested they emphasize the surreal nature of dancing outside with the

Meadows 28 artifacts of a bedroom. This iteration of the score suggests possibilities of how pillow:you:blanket Dances could be further developed.

Conclusion

When I started the process of creating pillow:you:blanket Dances, I was stuck in my room, frustrated by the realities of living amid a pandemic and its impact on the field of dance.

COVID-19 limited dancers to personal spaces, as they took virtual classes and hosted virtual concerts in a uniquely challenging “work from home” situation. As a dancer, I felt restricted not just physically but also creatively; it seemed that I was unable to host a concert, choreograph a piece with my peers, and so much more. However, a little more than a year later, I can appreciate the spatial limitations created by COVID-19 in a new way. Through making pillow:you:blanket

Dances, I created a unique way to share an experience of a place, something I would have never attempted if not for COVID-19.

I hope to continue developing pillow:you:blanket Dances, since it exemplifies my artistic interest. As I created my thesis project, I identified embodiment, explored through sensory-based movement investigation, as an artistic interest. I hope to create other versions of pillow:you:blanket Dances inspired by different spaces like a kitchen or basement. By doing so, I can continue investigating and understanding spaces through embodiment. I am also interested in further adapting the score to be performed for an audience, as I did for the “Spring Senior

Portfolio Works Walk Through Concert.” I would like to create a version for non-quarantined times where a large group of dancers performs together in a public space, finally able to interact with each other as well as the pillow and blanket. Passersby and audience members would be

Meadows 29 invited to watch or participate in the score themselves. In these ways, I can see myself further developing the pillow:you:blanket Dances score as I continue my artistic career.

As I look to the future and the possibility of life post-pandemic, I believe my project will remain meaningful for myself and the dance field. Yanira Castro, an established choreographer, recently completed a work similar to pillow:you:blanket Dances, as she adapted one of her live performances into a series of scores meant to be performed at home with everyday objects.

Castro said “I really didn’t want it to be about the screen,” about this work, Last Audience: A

Performance Manual (qtd in Burke, Make Some Noise and Move). Choreographers are responding to humanity’s increasing absorption in technology and obliviousness to the world all around them. My score allows dancers to explore themselves and their relationship to their environment in a rigorous yet playful way, needed in times when we are absorbed in virtual worlds like never before.

Pillow:you:blanket Dances is a site-inspired improvisational score, created to serve dancers during a time of quarantine and self-isolation. Through the completion of this thesis project, I discovered new ways to share dance with others despite COVID-19 restrictions. By doing so, I created a score that encourages people to notice their spaces, because as they do, they gain a deeper knowledge of themselves and their relationship to their surroundings. This is a valuable practice while individuals become increasingly isolated from their communities and engrossed in virtual environments. As COVID-19 acted as a catalyst for cyberlife, it also acted as a catalyst for this project, as I worked within new realities to unearth novel approaches to dance making and dissemination.

Meadows 30

Appendix A:

The written text of the improvisational score, as linked on the pillow:you:blanket

Dances’s website, is displayed below.

Tuck yourself in.

What textures do you feel? rough yet smooth weathered oiled worn-down warmth

Start to stir, to swish - touch more surfaces. Cold dull grate underneath my foot. The smooth shell of my door almost plasticky

What if you tuck yourself out?

Take a moment to notice your weight. What is it melting into?

What is yielding into your body? The strong beneath holds my back. Rumpled piles of clothes heavy and floppy. flop. Layers of sheets airy yet warm on my skin

Explore the different ways you, the pillow, and the blanket support one another’s weight.

What if one of you falls?

Meadows 31

Can you catch each other? I’m creating relationships - me, the pillow, and the blanket.

Can you glide on one another? Stretch each other? What if everything becomes loose?

Explore by traveling over, around, under, and through the objects. Perhaps you are finding new places. That under-over feeling. feels like a puzzle fitting me into. It’s very clunky, very awkward

Let the objects traverse the topography of your body.

rushing smooth smooth smooth

Next, burrow under one another.

Begin to settle.

Spread yourself out.

A sense of ease and pleasure Breathe, deep,

Then, find rest.

Meadows 32

Appendix B:

I have included a series of screenshots of the website pillowyoublanket.org I created to display the pillow:you:blanket Dances score. The screenshots are divided into separate web pages and are arranged in vertical order, so that as you read down the page of this paper, it is as if you are scrolling down the website page.

Home Web Page

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Score Web Page

Meadows 34

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About Web Page

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Contact Web Page

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Submissions Web Page

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Meadows 40

Example of Submission Blog Post

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