Performance Project: ONE-ish
Course Description
Summary
In this performance project, we will create a new original work in which a single “figure” is composed collectively by all participants. Like an AI-generated image built from multiple faces, this piece emerges through layering—of movement, personal text, and presence—into a shared body.
Each student will generate individual material through improvisation, writing, and embodied exploration. These fragments will be combined, reworked, and distilled into a choreographic structure that the entire group will learn and perform together as a collective “solo.” The process moves between individual creation and group composition, asking how difference, contradiction, and multiplicity can coexist within a single, shifting body.
This course is for students who are curious about performance-making, interested in experimental and collaborative processes, and willing to commit to an explorative rehearsal environment. Prior experience in dance or theater is welcome but not required. The course will culminate in a public showing at the end of the term.
Learning Outcomes
- Develop a sustained commitment to a collaborative rehearsal process and collective creation
- Cultivate the ability to listen deeply—to your own body, others, and the emerging work
- Strengthen observational awareness, both from within the process and from an outside perspective
- Explore what it means to perform, including presence, attention, and relation to others and audience
- Engage in creative risk-taking and experimentation within a supportive ensemble environment
Prerequisites
Permission of Instructor
For inquiry and permission, please contact the instructor Mina Nishimura (mnishimura@bennington.edu) with a brief motivation statement and description about previous experience/training in dance, theater or any kind of body-based form
Corequisites
Dance or Drama lab assignment if students sign up for 4 or more credits in designated dance courses.