An LSSU dance performance on April 1. No foolin'

NEWS RELEASE

LAKE SUPERIOR
STATE UNIVERSITY

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It’s no joke - LSSU Dance Program to perform on April Fool’s Day

SAULT STE. MARIE, MI - Lake Superior State University’s dance program will feature a collaboration between faculty and students in the dance, creative writing, and visual arts programs at its spring concert, “movement/text/image,” on Friday, April 1, at the LSSU Arts Center.

A gallery reception will begin at 6:30 p.m., and the performance will begin at 7:30 p.m.

Tickets are $5 for adults and $3 for seniors and students.

“I am really excited about this event.” said professor Joshua Legg, who runs the LSSU dance program. “We have teamed up with faculty and students from the creative writing and visual arts programs to create a unique interdisciplinary event. We’ve been working on the central, collaborative portion of this evening all semester.”

Legg said his choreography students have worked with Prof. Mary McMyne’s creative writing students and professor Lloyd Eddy’s art students to create small group projects around a common idea.

The small groups were made of one or two artists from each discipline, and those groups then chose their own cooperative approach to that idea, and the individual group members each came up with their own way of addressing the group’s concept.

Then, the groups put the pieces together.

Legg said the evening includes a gallery showing at 6:30 p.m., where audience members can view the paintings and sculptures the visual artists created, as well as read poems, narratives, and dramatic monologues the writers developed as part of the collaboration.

At 7:30 p.m., the first half of the concert will feature the performance pieces.

“Together, each group developed their own ideas about how to present the material they created,” Legg said. “You’ll see some multimedia projects with projections of the artwork, live performances of the text and dance, perhaps a short film, and other approaches to the concept.”

McMyne said she is excited about the freedom each group had in deciding how to present their work.

“We asked each group to begin with an idea or feeling they wanted to express about their subject, and then select a form that would best communicate that concept,” she said. “There were no rules as far as to the form the collaborations had to take. It’s inspired some really stimulating discussions about the relationship between form and content in art.”

The idea to combine the disciplines for the event came to Legg not long after he joined LSSU’s faculty last fall.

“Our art gallery has a fantastic permanent collection,” Legg said. “My first time visiting the L. F. Noyes Native American and Western Art Collection, I started thinking that many of the pieces could be a great inspiration for dances. That’s particularly true of Patricia Mathiesen’s One with the Eagle. The work is stunning. I filed that idea in the back of my head, and thought I’d focus the spring concert around that concept.

“As I learned more about what my colleagues were doing in art and creative writing, though, my idea continued to grow, and I realized there was an excellent opportunity to collaborate with my fellow artists, and for us to introduce a collaborative process to our students.”

“This is a chance for our students to break out of the silos that all too often isolate creative disciplines,” Eddy said. “We have collaborated between classes in the past; however this approach is unique. Instead of reacting to each other’s finished products, students have been working together from the inception of this concept, which has fostered a confluence of creativity in the artistic process.”

McMyne, Eddy, and Legg have also collaborated on a project, taking full opportunity to share in this interdisciplinary process along with their students.

Hannah Conner, one of the student choreographers, said, “Being able to work with students in other artistic disciplines has been eye-opening. Instead of depending solely on my own creativity, I had the chance to collaborate with others. This allowed me to infuse my aesthetic with ideas that come from different artistic genres.”

The second half of the performance will also include dances created by students from Legg’s spring choreography course, and senior dance minors completing thesis projects.

For more information about the performance, contact Legg at 906-635-2265 or clegg@lssu.edu.

For more information on Arts Center performances, visit here or the center’s Facebook page.

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