Every so often, I strike upon an idea for a dance that is deliciously geeky and wonderful. I can’t always act immediately upon those ideas, so I keep a folder of potential dance ideas that I can refer back to when I need some inspiration. I thought I’d post some of my more interesting concept nuggets here for all of you to see. I’ll continue to post new ideas as they come to me, and I greatly welcome any feedback or comments on them. In the future you’ll be able to link directly to all the concept nugget posts from the “post topics” menu, under “future projects.”

Red Light, Green Light

This collection of site-specific dance vignettes would explore the curiosities of urban planning and pedestrian and motor traffic. The vignettes would be performed simultaneously at various locations all over a given area, with the intent that passing drivers and pedestrians would “bump into” several dances in the course of one trip.

Child’s Play

To create the movement vocabulary for Child’s Play, the cast would begin by playing several rounds of the popular game Twister. They would then rehearse and codify the resulting contortions to create a complex dance full of kaleidoscopic intricacies. The cast for this piece would be small and intimate, two or three at the most.

Osmose

Taking its inspiration from the world of molecular physics, Osmose would illustrate several concepts integral to that field through the medium of dance. In the course of the piece the dancers would become atomic particles, alternately forming epoxies, creating nuclear reactions, mingling with each other through osmosis, and falling victim to the chain reaction of polymerization.

Album Intact

This evening-length work or series of works would deal with the task of taking a pre-existing music mix and creating a cohesive concert around the album. All tracks must be included, in the order they appear on the album, with no more silence than already exists on the album. The task could be repeated several times with several different albums of different genres and compositions.

The Misfit Bike Dance

Walking home from modern yesterday afternoon, Kinsey and I passed a bike rack and soon got started on an idea for a dance based around the strange contortions of someone riding a bicycle with an ill-adjusted seat. Ideas tossed around during our five-minute walk included various collaborations with bike shop owners and a thoroughly goofy-looking flamingo-like walk. Who knows where this idea will go!

Geeksdanz refers to the process of creating dances based in “geeky” source material. Math, science, martial arts, anything that is not normally thought of as “dance” or “art” is fair game for the geeksdanz treatment. Geeksdanzes frequently have a structural or movement base that is intensely logical and obsessively accurate, though on the surface the final product may bear little or no resemblance to the source material. Geeksdanz works have been cited by audience members as being “refreshing” and “understandable,” and blissfully free of the angst that plagues so many of today’s modern dance works. Said one theatergoer after the 2007 premiere of P.447, “I knew what it was about, which is more than I can say for the rest of the pieces in the concert.”

~Ellen

Well, I think that’s it for Extreme Home Makeover: Website Edition! The bulk of the site is up and running, the sidebar works now, and the repertoire archives are up. I’ll be continuing to add more content in the next few days, but the logistics side of the site seems to be just about finished. On a related note, my geeksdanz email address is now officially up and working, so feel free to contact me on that. I’ll be posting more fun stuff in the next couple of days, so stay tuned!

~Ellen

Well, since I’m still working on getting all the parts of this site up and running, I thought I’d post a few pictures taken during a rehearsal for my senior thesis piece on November 30, 2007. The cast was involved in an improvisation experiment wherein they had to repeat the base material three times using a variety of manipulations. Manipulations at work in this rehearsal: isolation of one body part, repetition and accumulation of movement, and the direction to complete the phrase as “unromantically” as possible.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned as the site continues to improve and become more finished!

~Ellen