Above is a still from the choreographer Moriah Evan’s work “Repose,” a piece I first encountered in class this semester. Related to this class, can you guess what’s going on in the photos below?
If you guessed: Yale undergrads performing their midterms for “Moving Sites and Structures,” you are correct (and a very good guesser)!
According to the syllabus, Moving Sites and Structures is “a studio-based study of choreographic invention, focusing on innovative structures that choreographers develop to shape movement material, and the effects of situating such structures in site-specific environments.” In my own words, this just means dancing in funky places. This class is one of my favorites that I’m taking this semester (alongside The Writer’s Room for TV and The Craft of Poetry) because it’s unlike most other courses at Yale.
Every week, we read articles or watch clips related to dance or abstract movement practice, and then for four hours on Wednesday, we get to spend time in class choreographing our own works inspired by what we’ve interacted with. The core of the class is postmodern dance, and it’s challenged me to rethink the ways that my body acts in space, from the physical to the social. Performing a dance on a public stairwell or in the middle of the street kind of forces this out of you…
One of the most personally impactful tidbits I’ve gleaned from this class is that our gazes can be architectural: it matters where we are looking each day. I often think about how many hours I spend in a seated position, whether I’m working in the library or watching White Lotus on my couch. However, I never really think about how my eyes can follow a similar pattern. Most often, they are locked into one position, focused straight ahead of me. A reading assigned in the class made me consider how in the same way we might need to move our bodies in order to access new emotions or ways of being, we might have to change our gazes (or how we construct our gazes) in order to create new experiences of the world. So beyond fighting eye strain, trying to use my periphery more often, soften my gaze, or generally employ my sight in variable ways, can transform my perception and consequent experience of the things around me. The photos above are only taken from one angle, but when we were watching them in person, every person had a different subjective experience of the piece being performed before them. How the performer potentially played with these gazes, or toyed with the possibilities for conflicting audience interpretations, brought a whole new edge to their midterms.
If this isn’t your cup of tea, there are thankfully hundreds (if not thousands) of other Yale courses to choose from. But if you like dancing to the sound of traffic or rolling around a patch of grass in a Kafka-esque way, Moving Sites and Structures might be the course for you.
