Inevitable Circling: the work of dreams is a collaborative project by the second-year MFA cohort. This project is a recurrence, a spiraling return to origin and imagination. The collaborators come from a variety of nationalities, community origins, and cultural identities, to weave together their own imagined stories of the cosmos and creation. Through the performance, they acknowledge the cyclical nature of living, dying, and transforming, telling, and retelling one story from 8 perspectives. The audience is invited to participate in the creative process as it unfolds in the space. Traversing through the Urban Arts Space galleries, the audience participants will witness the recurring events from multiple perspectives, physical positions, and conceptual frameworks.
BTS
This work was inspired by our first collective piece we choreographed in grad school as a cohort and a storytelling fused with shadow play project I did. After our 8 out of 8 project (click here to read about it), we planned to work again in the near future but did not know when. We just knew it was great to work collectively, bouncing ideas off each other and producing as a team/family. At the end of Spring semester 2021, Yukina one of my colleagues secured a performance slot at Urban Arts Space for Autumn 2021. She said, “we discussed that the group would like to work together again and this will be a good opportunity to showcase new work.” Now we had a venue, but we did not have a piece to show yet. Moreover, the first piece we choreographed was about eight to ten minutes and now we needed to put together an evening length work. We decided not to beat ourselves with that yet, so we encouraged ourselves to have a meeting at the beginning of Autumn 2021 to brainstorm.
Beginning of Autumn 2021, we scheduled a day to meet to discuss the ideas around our new project. Then Mollie, another colleague suggested that we develop an idea that I explored in my research studio class on Storytelling and shadow play, (that project can be found here). Everyone loved the idea and during the meeting, we brainstormed on which specific theme we wanted to work with. We decided to work on the ideas of storytelling, shadow play, relationships, life origin/cycles and the elements of the universe. We had several writing workshops to develop these ideas while making time to create in the studio on Sundays. We needed an extra time to plan logistically for the performance so an hour every Friday was set aside to talk and plan for the upcoming weeks. We could not rehearse at Urban Arts Space till the performance week, and this was a little bit challenging. We had to set aside time to go load in and set up the space while taking classes and teaching class. Because of time conflicts with people’s schedule, we created a google sheet where people updated it with their free times.
In all the project was a successful one but stressful because we were the creators, dancers, directors, stage managers and stagehands. A few undergrads in the depart offered to help during the performance to take some of the workload off and I am grateful they came at the right time and made the show a great one. Also, to the chair of the department, Susan Petry who began the journey with our rehearsal a few times to provide feedback. Finally grateful to the faculty and fellow grads who viewed the performance during our tech rehearsal to provide feedback in time before the show.
On the day of the performance, we had two amazing shows and the audience was excellent each time making our investigation of storytelling and audience participation successful.
The Creative Process 