College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item LAST DANCE, LOST DANCE: STRATEGIZING INDETERMINACY TOWARD LIVE AND EMERGENT CHOREOGRAPHIES(2023) Villanueva, Carlo Antonio Ortega; Keefe, Maura; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Last Dance, Lost Dance is a 30-minute interdisciplinary performance piece that explores the concept of indeterminacy in performance. Indeterminacy—the phenomenon of a performer making decisions during performance—is a reifying analytical perspective from which dance improvisation can be seen, applied, and understood. Instinctively directed and choreographed by Carlo Antonio Ortega Villanueva, Last Dance, Lost Dance resists the fixity of choreographic form in pursuit of relational, responsive collaborations in performance strategy and (interdisciplinarily) with theater design. To do so, Last Dance, Lost Dance reschedules choreography to include the moment of performance, through the use of improvisational strategies; and reconfigures choreography to include the design and movement of mise en scène. As a result, Last Dance, Lost Dance commands the full apparatus of the theater despite its imposed rubrics for form, beauty, and aesthetic; and its choreography emerges in real time, authored live by its performers. These experimental modes of choreography ask and dance the question: “What is the relationship between form and possibility?” This document, “Last Dance, Lost Dance: Strategizing Indeterminacy Toward Live and Emergent Choreographies,” supports and contextualizes Last Dance, Lost Dance with discussions of dance and the archive, Asian American postmodern performance, and photographic and narrative documentation of the creative research, development, and critical reflections of Last Dance, Lost Dance; it is accompanied by an archival video of the performance.Item Reviving the Dead Zone: The Creation and Development of ambiguous gaps(2018) Graham, Jennifer Brooke; Keefe, Maura; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)After identifying a pattern of creating product-driven work and feeling deeply dissatisfied and limited as a result, dance artist Jen Graham committed herself to releasing habit, following her instincts, and trusting the process of unfolding to find a new creative process and create her Master’s thesis work, ambiguous gaps. Launching an investigation into the physical relationships between people through an exploration of the intersections of dance improvisation, jazz dance values, and the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System, Graham endeavored to illuminate the physical and metaphoric gaps which must be navigated to create, shift, and maintain connection. This text details her journey through inspiration, research, creation, performance, and reflection.Item The Status of Instruction in Composition in Elementary General Music Classrooms of MENC Members in the State of Maryland(2008-05-05) Phelps, Kerry Bowman; Silvey, Philip; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this study was to examine the status of composition activities in elementary level general music classrooms in the state of Maryland. Participants (N=60) completed an online questionnaire with questions in the areas of teacher demographics, beliefs about composition, and frequency of composition activities in the classroom. Responses indicated that composition was present, at a low frequency, at all student grade levels. Relationships were found between student grade level and structure of composition activity and student grade level and group structure of composition activity. Implications of the frequency of composition activities as well as relationships found for music education are discussed. Suggestions are made for increasing the frequency of composition activities by building upon the most common practices identified by this study.Item Bit of nostalgia... for one or two percussionists and live electronics performer(2006-04-30) Boyd, Michael; DeLio, Thomas; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bit of nostalgia is a work for one or two percussionists and a live electronics performer that explores performer creativity through a graphic score and investigates the ways that the objects performers interact with (instruments) shape their actions/performances. The percussionist(s) take an active role in designing the stage set-up for each performance by superimposing a grid on the performance space, and filling at least half of the sectors with combinations of instrument-types listed in the piece's instructions (including objects made of metal, wood, glass, paper, plastic, and stone). Each sector that contains groups of instruments also contains a music stand holding three of eighteen closely related score pages. The similarities inherent in the various score pages requires that performers frequently reinterpret quasi-redundant visual materials with greatly varying groups of instruments (and objects), emphasizing the differences between each instrument group. While the performance proceeds, another performer interprets the same score using Cycling 74's MAX/MSP (software that accomplishes real-time sound synthesis and processing) to process and playback sound segments from recordings of previous rehearsals and/or performances. To accomplish this, the computer performer utilizes some or all of nine MAX/MSP patches (single windows containing a user designed graphical interface) of my design that incorporate differently controlled ring modulation, filtering, and delay in isolation or various combinations. The percussionists directly respond to these sounds as well as each other while interpreting certain pages of the score that contain the letters I, O, and T (signifying imitate, oppose, and transform respectively). These letters direct the performers to address sounds/actions produced by the other performer, themselves, or the electronics through their interpretations. Through these interactions, I hope to bring a sense of self-history into the piece and create an interesting notion of depth which reflects a broader perspective of what constitutes a "work." Whereas one typically thinks of an artwork as a fixed entity such as a score, I am trying to overtly link and interconnect otherwise marginalized and disparate aspects that contribute to the totality of this piece such as rehearsals and performances.