Begins May 7th, 2023

Scores can serve as the instructions for quite literally anything. For a dancer, they give uncanny propositions for movement. For dances that are site-specific, they open the door towards the inclusion of objects, places, animals, strangers…

And they don’t have to be text-based, they can use sound, code, diagrams, or natural elements as instructions for something that can be performed – a ritual, a task, a sequence. It is within this interaction that scores propose collaboration, they demand to be read, listened to, followed, touched, watched, danced to, reflected with…

A new form of poetry in the act of spontaneous composition.

About this course:

We will experiment with text and sound-based poetic forms as tools for the choreographic process.  The course will consist of four practice-based workshop sessions and one presentation session. Each will focus on the translation of an internal, literary space to an embodied, performative one. Topics will include: erasure poetry, vocal score, kinetic poetry, automatic poetry, weather poetry, and character embodiment. 

Students will complete weekly tasks based on the topics covered in the sessions. Students will also have the opportunity to pursue a project that elaborates on the topics covered throughout the course, including (but not limited to) a combination of each practical workshop component into an interdisciplinary artistic product. Students will receive individual feedback on their project, both during sessions and offline. At the conclusion of the course, we will offer students the chance to display their finished projects in a public gallery on the Big Sky website.

Topics :

1. Erasure Poetry

Form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains. A collaboration between the poet and the text, and an inherently choreographic one. It challenges what existed before by reformatting, rearranging, reimagining what can now exist in its place. Students will be tasked with creating a choreographic score from an existing text.

2. Vocal score

Whilst exploring our voices through guided exercises and communal exposure, students will create a vocal score to move to.  Vocal sound, words, metaphors and onomatopoeia and more will be used to compose a sounding poem.

3. Kinetic Poetry

Form of poetry that relies on spatiotemporal transitions with expressive literary, visual and aural layers. Some poets and critics thought of “kinetic poetry” as dynamic visual poems, flip books, or book objects (artists’ books) that would convey the illusion of movement. Students will be tasked with creating a zine/textual object from found words & images. 

4. Automatic poetry

Stream of conscious led writing technique that allows words to be sumon out of thought, guided by its sonority and free association. This technique became popular among the surrealist movement.  Students will be challenged to write around 2 and 3 free verse poems to use as chorographic material.

5. Weather Poetry

From J.R. Carpenter’s Writing Coastlines, Weather Poetry refers to writing that is intertwined in the context of its production and of its consumption. We are writing but the coastlines themselves are also writing in so far as they are translating physical processes into marks and actions. Writing coastlines are edges, ledges, legible lines caught in the double bind of simultaneously writing and erasing. These in-between places are liminal spaces, both points of departure and sites of exchange. Students will be tasked with creating an ekphrastic concrete poem in response to a weather system. 

6. Character Embodiment

Theatre led class where students will build a character based on a daily routine.  Finding details on everyday activities, students will choose one character from a book and give life and movement to it in the form of a 3 to 4 minutes observation and written base choreography.

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