Laura Briggs will be presenting their honors thesis research at the concert on Thursday and Friday March 21 and 22 at 7:30pm in the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. Laura is a senior, majoring in both dance and movement studies and chemistry. With a cast of six dancers, this work is a series of solos entitled Karass that weave together and use Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle as source material.
Read on to find out more about Laura's research process!
I have been a huge Kurt Vonnegut fan ever since I checked out my first copy of Cat’s Cradle in my high school library. His novels are simultaneously humorous and heart-breaking, brief and descriptive, sardonic and deeply human. Re-reading his work in college, I wondered if I could embody this unique style in movement form. This question served as the genesis of a year-long attempt to translate the major themes of Cat’s Cradle into movement form.
My dancers and I used the text of Cat’s Cradle to generate movement material. In one exercise, we each selected two numbers and created phrases inspired by the title of the corresponding chapter of Cat’s Cradle. I also spent time improvising on film while listening to Vonnegut reading his novel out loud. Then, I derived a series of prompts from my movements and delivered the prompts to the dancers to create their own phrases. The process of translating and re-translating text to movement and back again was instrumental to developing material rooted in the novel.
The resulting series of intertwined solo dances, Karass, explores the functionality of religion on a personal and institutional scale. During the concert, the dancers share their own experiences with religion, spirituality, and the existence of a higher power. The movement vocabulary, a series of ethereal and mundane non-sequiturs, echoes from one dancer to another throughout the piece. I do not see this dance as the end product of my research, but as the beginning of a lifetime of movement investigation.
Thank you Laura!
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