On Saturday February 6, 2021, the Dance Education Laboratory held its seventh annual Movement Sentence Choir - the first-ever virtual Movement Sentence Choir event over Zoom. Over the course of three hours more than 60 dancers from throughout the US and all over the world experienced the DEL model through the creation of an original group dance led by Taryn Vander Hoop, DEL facilitator, choreographer, and co-director of Summation Dance; and Yin Yue, Artistic Director of YYDC. Musician Kyle Olsen created an original score to accompany the dance-making and final choreography. This year's theme was COME TOGETHER AND UNITE and used the action words FLOW, ROOT, CUT, CONNECT, based on Yin Yue's innovative contemporary dance technique, FoCo Technique ™
Nel Shelby Productions captured the dance-making process to create the final Movement Sentence Choir film, premiering on Friday, March 19 at 1 PM ET on DEL's
Facebook and
Instagram. The film is also available on DEL's
website.
Creating a new piece for so many people over Zoom was a unique challenge. Taryn worked out musical cues and called the show in the chat, leaning into the chaos. "I think we pulled off a really amazing experience for the participants. Some participants told me it's the most they had felt like a dancer, or like they were actually on stage, since COVID began almost a year ago," she comments. "These DEL Movement Sentence Choirs are beautiful community experiences that show the power of dance and art to unite us, whether we are in person or remote."
Yin tailored her approach to the action words, making them easy to transfer and adapt onto different bodies. "FLOW is the essence of my movement quality," she comments. "In order to flow the performer needs to understand resistance and control. It was a perfect word to start the practice and activate the awareness in each muscle and joint. ROOT is the one of the five elements in FoCO Technique™. It represents and promotes the sense of groundedness which offers the performer the ability to demonstrate the stability and the interaction with gravity in motion. CUT is a shape-edged movement that can inspire many creations. We use words to make sentences and how to CONNECT sentences to make a paragraph, aka dance. Then through virtual experience, how we can then connect with each other in our own space through screen. Connection is what eventually we want performers and performance to achieve."
The Movement Sentence Choir film was made possible by the generosity of the Arnhold Foundation.
