light/weight - 55-60 Minutes

Direction and Choreographic Concept by Joel Mejia Smith

Created in collaboration with Hyoin Jun and Maggie Sniffen

Performed by: Joel Mejia Smith, Hyoin Jun and Maggie Sniffen

Music: Steve Roden

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Premiered at Culver Center of the Arts, Riverside, CA. November, 15, 2016

 

Supporting Materials This Review Period

Listing: UCR ARTS 

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light/weight is a 50-minute performance score that reflects a rigorous, yearlong practice of contact improvisation. Seeking to offer up more opportunities for our grads to work professionally with faculty, I asked Hyoin Jun and Maggie Sniffen to work with me, hoping that the three of us together could generate rich possibilities for relationship/meaning building given how much we differed in size, shape, race, ethnicity, age, gender and sexuality. Thus a goal of the work was to disrupt potential assumptions about expected role or danced responsibility in relation to these identity/identifying characteristics. Power dynamics are muted in relation to who is lifting, supporting, and climbing, as well as in how the gaze and quality of touch are employed. light/weight unravels over the course of the evening, revealing various theatrical devices used to frame and contextual the dancing. The beginning of the work takes on a more polished physicality and performance structure. As the dance progresses, the body language of dancers becomes more loose, costumes get stripped to rehearsal clothes, voice and laughter is permitted, and calling out of cues can be heard. The piece starts to resemble a rehearsal, with audience able to see how the improv structures work, and concludes with audience members invited to dance and ultimately jam.

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Work Sample

Note about the work sample - 15 minutes into the performance the camera was unplugged accidentally and erased all of the data on file. I've used photographs to represent what was not captured.