For my One Hour Study, I wanted to engage in a new choreographic creative practice intended to shift my own choreographic approach, and explore how personal styles of movement and backgrounds/pervious training in dance influence the choices dancers make in learning and executing movement. My process consisted of me giving five dancers a survey about their previous dance background, then giving them a phrase which they then manipulated into what felt comfortable in their bodies. I prompted them to change the dynamics and tempo into whatever they wanted and to interpret the choreography in their own way. I then told each dancer when to start, and let them work through it from there.

        My One Hour Study gave me a chance to explore my own choreographic practices while working in a collaborative environment. Through this study, I was able to see how one phrase can be adapted into multiple phrases and potentially could make an entire piece. It was interesting to see how each dancer chose to make their phrase their own and how they interacted with one another. Results from the survey I gave the dancers showed how they thought their previous dance background informs how they choreograph and move.

            I was interested in doing this as my study because I come from a background where it was mostly the choreographer teaching the dancers movement and we did exactly as choreographer said with little input; until I came to this university I was not very familiar with the collaborative creative process. My first semester sparked my interest in further exploring the process of making a work collaboratively when I worked with Eddie Taketa. He had us do a series of room reads and adaptations of his and other dancer’s phrases to create a twelve-minute piece. I was fascinated to see how much material was generated from a series of small phrases. I wanted to further explore this method through my own choreography and see how movement could evolve into something completely new.

            In this video, there is the original phrase that I choreographed, then three different versions of what the dancers came up with some instruction from me. I wish I had more than one hour to continue to play around with the final product!