EDC Choreographer Spotlight: Maria McNiece

Maria McNiece is our next choreographer spotlight! Maria is a junior at Emory double majoring in dance & movement studies and business. Her work Cubism uses a 26-foot 4x4 grid to translate the concept of cubism into three-dimensional movement using six dancers. This is her first time choreographing for EDC and she is very excited to share this work!

Read on to find out more about Maria's creative process!

*Responses have been edited for length and clarity

As an artist, I'm interested in creating work which evades narrative and entertainment to explore functional movement, and I sought to express my artistic values clearly through this work. Cubism is a group exploration of shape and line, a tethered relationship to inanimate grid, and design of movement patterns around a space.

This first months of rehearsals were characterized by collaborative movement generation between me and my dancers. We used prompts related to angularity, line, and directionality to create dozens of phrases, and then worked to select the most interesting explorations and curate the work's structure. As a group, we created a complete exploration of what it meant to translate cubism through movement. This process was highly collaborative; I do not have the talent alone to create the caliber of work as a team of seven can.

For this work, the stage is structured with lines of masking tape constructing a 26-foot, 4x4 grid on the floor. The dancers' movement outlines the geometry of the squares, places them inside the grid, and ultimately, deconstructs the rules of the physical structure which characterize the piece. I am inspired by the functional aesthetic of costumes utilized by Trisha Brown Dance Company, and worked with designer Cyndi Church to dress my dancers similarly. The pure functionality of the costume choices reflect my proclivity to minimize production elements and only showcase the essential.

As a movement artist, I am especially inspired by the avant-garde and postmodern style developed most prominently by Merce Cunningham during the 1960/70s. When I was beginning this process and considering how I wanted the work's vocabulary to materialize, I decided to apply postmodern values into movement generation while leaning into my love of floor work. The first drafts of this work utilized a vocabulary of floor work exclusively; however, as the work developed, I felt the need to explore cubism on different levels and planes, and could not ignore the possibilities of bringing my dancers off the floor. The final product of this process includes movement on every level of space, with clear attention form the dancers on their bodies' shape, line, and directionality.

Thanks Maria!

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