Performance Project: ONE-ish
Course Description
Summary
In this performance project, we will create a new original work in which a single “figure” emerges from the many bodies, beings, objects, places, and experiences that make up our world. Rather than imagining an individual as a fixed, separate identity, we will explore the possibility of a body composed of multiple presences and relationships.
Each student will begin by researching something or someone in their everyday surroundings—a person, an object, a place, a natural element, or anything that sparks their curiosity. Through observation, investigation, improvisation, writing, and embodied exploration, students will transform their research into movement, text, and other performance materials.
These individual creations will then be shared, combined, reworked, and distilled into a collective choreographic structure. The entire group will learn and perform this material together, creating a kind of collective “solo” in which human and nonhuman presences, personal experiences, and unexpected encounters coexist within a single, shifting figure.
Moving between research, individual experimentation, and group composition, we will investigate how a body might become a meeting place for things beyond itself, and how a sense of self might emerge through its relationships with the world.
This course is for students who are curious about performance-making, interested in research-based and collaborative creative processes, and willing to commit to an exploratory 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 skills in artistic research through observation, investigation, and embodied engagement with everyday people, objects, places, and environments.
- Transform research findings and personal discoveries into original movement, text, and performance material.
- Explore the relationship between self and other, human and nonhuman, and individual and collective presence through performance-making.
- Develop a sustained commitment to collaborative creation, including sharing, reworking, and composing individual materials into a collective work.
- Cultivate deep listening and observational awareness, both from within the creative process and from an outside perspective.
- Strengthen performance skills through experimentation with presence, attention, embodiment, and relationships to others and the audience.
- Engage in creative risk-taking, critical reflection, 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.