ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Analysis between Ballroom and Ballet in Vienna Waltzes, Lecuona, and Tango Pasión

By

Chanel Kostich

Master of Fine Arts in Dance

University of California, Irvine, 2020

Professor Alan Terricciano, Chair

My research explores how Ballet and Ballroom influence each other choreographically through a close examination of several choreographic works from the companies New York City Ballet, Grupo Corpo, and Tango Pasión. I discuss the crossover in these works through movement analysis, narrative synopsis, and timeline analysis of the excerpts. My interview with Rodrigo Pederneiras, choreographer for the Brazilian Dance Company Grupo Corpo, provides an additional context as I compare his own claims about his creative process with my perceptions about his use of Ballroom dance in his Contemporary Ballet work.

This research explores the crossover between Ballet and Ballroom through the choreographic works Lecuona, Tango Pasión, and Vienna Waltzes. In collaboration with the dancers, I created a choreographic work inspired by this research to demonstrate the bidirectional influence that brings the two artforms together.

This thesis explores my choreographing methodology in relationship with U.S. copyrightlaw. After I graduated from UC Riverside in 2021, I encounter several challenges trying to choreograph in the US. For example, meeting short deadlines, maintaining a sense of authenticity, choreographing constantly and efficiently. For the past two years I’ve dedicated my studies at UC Irvine to develop a methodology that addresses said challenges; I discovered that through an understanding of copyright law I’ve become a more efficient and reliable choreographer. In the following pages I aim to help and inspire up and coming choreographers by delineating the specifics of my methodology. I provide in depth explanations of my creative process and explain how and why I register my choreographic works with the U.S. copyright office.

This thesis investigates multiple collaborative modes that choreographers and composers employ to create new movement and new music for dance; and it documents the journey I took, as a choreographer, engaging in these types of collaborations. Throughout my research, I studied various collaborative methods utilized by choreographers and composers throughout the 20th century. These historical examples informed the methods I chose to use with three different composers to make new works. In each collaboration, the order of creating dance and music varied, resulting in three methods — choreography-first, music-first, and simultaneous creation. By working with the composers to create these dances, I gained valuable knowledge and made self-discoveries that will influence my future choreographic work. The results of this research will hopefully aid other collaborations that correlate music and dance and advance our understanding of the choreographer-composer dynamic.

"Dabke is manhood, existence in life," is how dabke, the line dance of Baalbekdance of Baalbek, a village in Lebanon, was described to me. Traditional dabke dances of Baalbek are for men only: and only '"real men'' do these dances. The women's place in this society is only to bear children. Yet these traditional male dances are becoming a stage vestige. In addition to belly dance, another traditional Middle Eastern form, only the dabke danced by both men and women is performed, and only at celebrations. My thesis investigates the role of dance, especially dabke. in the modern Baalbek culture. My observations of male and female behavior in this society, as well as the relationship between the genders, and the effect of television on the culture, were instrumental in helping me draw conclusions about the evolution of the dabke. The stories, along with an understanding of the political and economical situation in the area, provide necessary background to fully appreciate the role of dance, the dabke in particular, in this culture.

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

CANON

The Cinematic Story Ballet (Cineballet):

&

How I Learned to Choreograph Cognition from William Shakespeare

by

Jehbreal Muhammad Jackson

Master of Fine Arts in Dance

University of California, Irvine, 2020

Professor Alan Terricciano, Chair

As a young artist interested in many art forms, I yearned for a way to focus my attention on them all or focus them all into one singular vision. This total artwork was given form through various artistic encounters with the works of William Forsythe, George Balanchine, Stanley Kubrick and Johann Sebastian Bach, but was solidified upon discovering the plays of William Shakespeare. After falling in love with the plays of Shakespeare during a particularly tumultuous time in my life, I began to research his creative craftmanship. During my research I simultaneously encountered the beginnings of a pursuit of scholarship regarding Shakespeare and cognition, while also using my discoveries to develop an artistic practice of my own.

Shakespeare’s pervasive reach has many sources, but one of his primary gifts and innovations is in his creation of “cognitive characters” as detailed by the scholarship of Harold Bloom and the performance practices of John Barton. While researching cognition, I came to understand more clearly what Bloom and Barton meant by their claims of cognitive characters, but also discovered a paradigm shift in theoretical notions of cognition that have yet to reach the public consciousness. This paradigm shift proves the popular understanding of a separation of mind and body, initiated and disseminated by René Descartes, to be false and proposes that the body is a “thinking” entity itself through empirical evidence. The thinking body and how it initiates cognition has become my foundation for working towards creating cognitive characters, as Shakespeare did, in my cineballet CANON.

Cineballet, a story ballet written and choreographed specifically for film, is a new subgenre of screen dance that was created as a result of and a response to great trauma and adversity. It is my goal through this research to create works of art that speak to our current time as well as future generations to help people to live more enriched and healthy lives as the plays of Shakespeare have for me and countless others.