Presenter: Alyssa Puleo
Co-Presenter: Stephanie Ennes, Eleanor Christenson, Ferena Kagata
Mentors: Walter Kennedy and Brad Garner, Dance Department
Creative Work Presentation: C10 (EMU Ballroom Main Stage)
Major: Dance
In my experience as a dance major at the University of Oregon, I have noticed that dancers are completely integrated from daily dance classes, and have a wide range of movement vocabulary to support their audible statements in a conversation. A dancer’s body recognizes the feelings behind the statements being made, and adds to their point of view, by visually displaying their emotional reaction to the moment. I believe dance could be considered its own expressive language, because every formal language has a defined and limited vocabulary, but personal movement expressions do not. I hosted an improvisational dance therapy session over the span of two days. My dancers, Eleanor Christenson, Stephanie Ennes, and Ferena Kagata, were asked to remember a time and feeling in their life that they did not know how to directly put into words. The movement was rich and lived, with a lot of happenstance parallels between all three dancers. Their feedback was most interesting. They felt relieved after the process had come to a conclusion, almost as if they had released the emotional response out of their expression system, but didn’t have to use a codified language. I was thrilled with this, because I believe those who are terrified of talking to people about their anxiety or depression, can engage in an activity like this, and perhaps gain some comfort and relief from the pressure to keep it bottled up. Often times, people allow this to happen because they don’t feel comfortable allowing their bodies to live loose. Children are animated beyond belief in their movement, because it is socially acceptable to be expressive as a child. The older people become, the more rigid they are in their ability to express themselves through movement. I understand also that everyone is different, and not everyone expresses feelings through body animation. My goal in this study was to host a safe space for these people to observe new ways of moving by tapping into a different sensations and intentions to dance. In diving into the experience, they received feedback from their body about areas of tension and held traumatic experiences. Memories were revisited after years of neglect, and a cognitive shift occurred after the emotions were released from the subjects’ bodies. We created choreographed two group phrases but will be improvising in two other sections to save the sense of wonder and surprise that comes with tuning in to the human body.