DANCERS: Kurumi Yoshimoto, Ivy Lin, Nidhi Baadkar, Deeana Ou
CHOREOGRAPHY: Joyce Lo
MUSIC: Jóhann Jóhannsson, Tigran Hamasyan, Nicolas Jaar, Marta Roma, Sarah Palu
VOICE & POETRY NARRATION: Vanessa Demello
VIDEOGRAPHY and PHOTOGRAPHY: Michelle Ou, Justin Milburn
CREATED FOR: A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Dance
The impetus for this creation came from a long-standing desire to understand how our brains work, where our ideas come from, and how to learn the skills needed to satisfy my itch to create. I’ve wanted to be a choreographer, long before I knew how to choreograph. In high school, I was always in awe of how my teachers and peers could seemingly pull ideas out of thin air, a sudden flash of brilliance enabling them to arrange a symphony of dancers or orchestrate riveting sequences across the space. How did they do it, and how could I learn to do the same?
The research that I came across in neuroscientist Anthony Brandt and musical composer David Eagleman’s book The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes The World provided me with a framework that divided the landscape of cognitive operations into three basic (and easy to comprehend) strategies: bending, breaking, and blending. They suggest these are the primary means by which innovative thinking occurs, all of which involve taking existing concepts, knowledge, and experiences and refashioning them to create new outcomes.
Something Borrowed, Something New is a choreographic project that came to fruition through the intersectional study of art and science, and examining the relationship between the brain and the body. It stands at the edge of knowledge, seeing what we know, imagining what is yet to exist, and endeavours to fill the gap between the two.
Using the concepts presented by Brandt and Eagleman, Part I - Bend examines the abstraction of ballet, where two existing classical ballet female solo variations are modified and twisted to create something new. Using contemporary dance techniques, Part II - Break, explores fragmentation, where sequences and motifs are taken apart, expanded on, and rearranged. Part III - Blend, employs convergent thinking, where two or more sources, ideas, and dance forms are merged.
I am trying to create something that comes from our fundamental sense of curiosity and a non-discriminating view of ideas both old and new. Something cerebral yet physical, dancing in the space between knowing and wondering.
- Joyce Lo, programme notes