Roadtrip Dances was a four-day, 1500-mile road trip from Florida to Massachusetts, and then onto Maine, where I explored site-specificity and the idea of public performance by stopping for improvised performances in each state on the Eastern Seaboard. As I stopped in each state, I planned to improvise solo movement, working with a series of set performance parameters.
The trip also served as an opportunity for research; through my research I would collect observations on myself and how my feelings on performance might change, the portions of the country that I saw, the spontaneous audiences that I might encounter and whatever else piqued my interest, enabling me to collect experience to utilize after the trip ended. I planned to document the performances by filming movement, where appropriate, and sharing it on social media to offer it to a wider audience. I also planned to journal my observations and share some writing on my blog.
As I conceptualized this project and tried to define its purpose within my practice and to challenge my practice, I continued to experience a strong disconnect between my admiration of creative pedagogy and the act of giving permission, and my relationship with performance. Throughout my personal history I have had endless encouragement to be creative and explore my world artistically, and I don’t feel any limitations in experimenting and expressing creativity in public. I do, however, feel hugely limited in sharing my own performance publicly. It’s the idea of my having an audience, intentionally sharing my own movement with them, combined with frequent feelings of inadequacy in my earlier history as a mover that I believe attributes to the problem. On a theoretical level I don’t like the act of performing as I find it sometimes can be an overly artificial or contrived way to share a statement; I also struggle with feeling inadequate with the socially constructed norm of ”dancer”. To address those feelings, I have been on a personal quest to find authenticity in solo performance in attempts to remedy my reluctance to perform and grow as an artist. By performing in very public spots as part of my practicum trip and by further publicizing my performances by sharing them on social media, I challenged myself not just to perform, but also to be seen in the act of performance.
The final report for this project can be viewed in the gallery to the right.
Blog Entries & Performance Footage
Roadtrip Dances: Why and a False Start
Roadtrip Dances: Florida and on to Georgia
Roadtrip Dances: Charleston, South Carolina
Roadtrip Dances: From One Carolina to Another
Roadtrip Dances: Virginia and Maryland
Roadtrip Dances: Smaller States, Faster Travel
Roadtrip Dances: Live Free or Die