Jennifer Erin Newton, FCLC 2024

MAJOR: Dance, Visual Arts (conc. Architecture)

BIO: Erin Newton is a multi-disciplinary artist originally from Birmingham, Alabama. Her work as a dancer, choreographer, and visual artist seeks to interpolate disciplines, examining how melding the unexpected can challenge perspectives and push the limits of collaboration between the arts. She hopes to pursue dance and choreography after graduation and pursue a Master’s in Architecture in the future.

PROJECT TITLE: Dancing About Architecture: Movement in the Context of Designed Spaces

MENTOR: Mark Street, Department of Visual Arts

ABSTRACT: As dancers, we are often told that we have an intrinsic knowledge of space. Dancing in open studios or on bare or set-veneered stages though, we have little opportunity to push our exploration of how we can interact with and be inspired by the structures that surround us. As a visual arts student studying architecture, I wanted to investigate through my screendance project, Dancing About Architecture: Movement in the Context of Designed Spaces, how to utilize dance and architecture’s shared points of inspiration- like lines, shapes, texture, and energy flow- to create choreography that collaborates with and is truly shaped by its architectural surroundings. This project also examines how the specificity of an architectural context can affect dancers’ performance and an audience’s experience of the choreography and architecture, as compared to how site-specific dances are often only broadly inspired by their surroundings. To accomplish this, I analyzed three architectural sites in Berlin, Germany, a hub for modern architecture and modern dance, and worked with three local dancers to film the subsequent choreography on site. To evaluate the effect of the architecture on the performers and viewers, I then recreated and filmed the choreography in a blank studio with three different dancers who were not given the original architectural context for the choreography. From interviews with the on-site dancers, studio dancers, and viewers of the project, I concluded that the architectural context had an observable effect on the dancers and viewers, increasing dancers’ connection with the architecture and choreography as well as increasing viewers’ comprehension of both.