intERUPTion: Re-Viewing Motion, Image & the Dancing Body

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/44558d730

Abstract

intERUPTion: Re-Viewing Motion, Image & the Dancing Body is the written exploration of intERUPTion, my Bachelor of Fine Arts dance piece that was performed in Catapult: A BFA Dance Concert on February 15-17, 2013 in the Charlotte York Irey Theatre on the University of Colorado at Boulder’s campus. In the year-long process of creating intERUPTion, I choreographed, directed, and harvested material in collaboration with my cast of dancers through writing, conversation, mining gestural movement, improvisation, and embodiment of choreography. I was interested in women’s personal and cultural experiences with body image, and investigating these themes through movement and through a feminist lens. In my research I discovered a relationship between motion and interruption. Through this paper, I explore how interruption’s dual roles of judging the body along with interjecting and redirecting personal and cultural narratives of female body image manifested in movement material. The power that motion holds to subvert the objectified female form is also located within this conversation on interruption. Overall, I intend the work to expand and more deeply secure the understanding of the dancing body’s personal nature as political, as well as the dancing body’s important place in academic scholarship.

Creator