Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Artistic Development Grants: Or! How I Spent My Summer Vacation


The Center for the Arts has lots of friends and alumni who donate to support programs and scholarships in the arts. This year, with donor support, we offered up to 5 summer artistic development grants to students with innovative artistic projects proposed for summer 2010.


Jesse Mangan '12, who majors in multimedia design and dance, earned a grant to spend two weeks training, rehearsing, eating, living and performing with the PUSH physical theatre company of Rochester, New York http://pushtheatre.org/ . It was an intensive re-defining of dance, and what is possible within the fusion of dance and theatre and other physical artforms.


Jesse describes the experience: "My mornings training in modern dance, gymnastics and contemporary mime. Afternoons were spent working with non-traditional partnering, contact improvisation and Anne Bogart's viewpoints as students were guided to understand how structured movement explorations could be used to create new works. Our evenings were spent critiquing videos of mimes, dancers, actors and comedians and engaging in discussions on the history of contemporary mime, the evolution of modern dance, the survival of performance art in the digital age and the place of spirituality in the arts. While at PUSH the lines began to blur, I began to look at all of the different disciplines in the performance arts not as a series of separate definitions, but as one big conversation, I stopped thinking about the technique that I lack and delved into the emotion, physicality and stories that I have."

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