Circadian Rhythm: a Senior Project Performance
The seniors in the Theater Department at Dickinson College complete their education through a senior project in place of a thesis paper. My senior project fulfilled two categories within the department: Costume technology & design, and Performance. I created a performance piece by participating in the Applied Choreography class, and by working on my own to create the costume that the piece would be based around.
Circadian Rhythm was created on the idea of sleep cycles and dreams. I personally have a strange relationship with sleep and often feel stuck or unable to break away from dreams even after I have woken up. In Circadian a puppet begins to fall apart and acknowledge it's fall existence. Once stripped of it's exterior form, the creature inside tries to get back into its skin through various methods but is ultimately only partially successful.
This project demonstrates my work with performative mask, dance and movement, and crafts technology. I designed and built the puppet/mask and created the movement and narrative as a culmination of my work at Dickinson.
Circadian Rhythm was created on the idea of sleep cycles and dreams. I personally have a strange relationship with sleep and often feel stuck or unable to break away from dreams even after I have woken up. In Circadian a puppet begins to fall apart and acknowledge it's fall existence. Once stripped of it's exterior form, the creature inside tries to get back into its skin through various methods but is ultimately only partially successful.
This project demonstrates my work with performative mask, dance and movement, and crafts technology. I designed and built the puppet/mask and created the movement and narrative as a culmination of my work at Dickinson.
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The process and research around Circadian Rhythm is documented here.
This piece was designed to be performed episodically in the Freshworks '14 Dance Concert. Ultimately only excerpts of the piece were included. Photographs from this performance by Pierce Bounds are below:
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During the rehearsal period for Freshworks, it was decided that a longer and consecutive version of Circadian would be performed the next week to further explore the project. For this second performance I was able to include a great deal of the piece that had not been performed yet. The piece changed a fair amount for this black box theater performance, but it was in essence all of the original pieces strung together. My work in the Choreography class really helped with this second performance, because I had a large vocabulary of movement to explore and to work with. The Cubiculo black box provided a more intimate space for the piece, and I was able to share with the audience the complete story within Circadian Rhythm.
The video documentation of this performance is below:
The video documentation of this performance is below:
View the process of Circadian Rhythm Here»»
