Introduction to My Work

My name is Rachel Bruce. I am a graduate student at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. I’ve worked as a video producer, photographer, and web and print product designer for the last 7 years as well as a professional performer and choreographer in several small grassroots dance companies in Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington DC and am currently the publicity coordinator for Texas Woman’s University’s Department of Dance. I am in the third year of a 3-year program to earn a Master of Fine Arts in Performance and Choreography at TWU.

I have learned most of what I know out of necessity to carve out a place for myself in dance. I don’t stand out in auditions but I’m a good performer. I have talent for choreography because I absorb ideas and can organize them kinaesthetically first before ever understanding them abstractly or logically. I worked in a corporate job straight out of college as an administrative assistant because I had to eat. It was a position in a creative division of a military contracting firm made up of graphic designers, video producers and communication specialist. I also danced for a company, rehearsing in the evenings and on weekends.

Everything I learned at my corporate job that I had a vested interest in (barring the interest I had in keeping my job) was geared toward supporting the dance company. When we needed a poster to promote our shows, I found a co-worker who craved a creative outlet to volunteer. When we needed marketing, I paid attention to relevant ideas while at work. When we needed a program, I took a class under professional development (paid for by the company) that helped me learn a layout program in order to support the dance company. I got very good at seeing opportunities and making relevant connections to support the dance work I wanted to be doing.

Artistic Statement
I am an artist interested in making relational connections. From the movement in and from our bodies connecting to the movement in and from person to person, these are the movements that form relationships; relationships amongst people, ideas and movement. I am interested in asymmetry as a means of skewing conventionality and perspective. I am interested in developing movement quality as the voice of specific work.

Choreographic Process

I mainly enter the work through emotion and movement quality. Most of the time I am situated somewhere in between controlling and guiding the concept and am concerned with the accomplishing goals and nurturing the dancers rather than making master works. I’ve learned a lot from this approach.

Here are some examples of my work and the process I engaged in to create them:
White After Labor Day

Worked from a piece of music that inspired me. I had a vision of the kind of humor that the music inspired and it was a challenge to develop it. I worked with dancers with a wide range of skill sets so it was sometimes a challenge to generate the type of movement quality I thought the piece needed. I gave set movement phrases and tailor them to the dancers as well as asking them to create movement phrases based on what I had already given them. I thought that by doing this, I would receive feedback on what motifs were the strongest as well as the ones that the cast was kinaesthetically relating to.

dive

“dive” is a multi-media piece using video footage and the flat it was being projected on as another performer. I developed the movement and the structure first with a first draft of the video footage. I realized that I had too many metaphors in the video footage and should distil it down to one. I chose one metaphor – diving/floating – based on the movement vocabulary that had been developed. I originally called this piece “living in the blindspot” because I wanted it to be about making the choice to live wide-awake to not be indifferent. The movement vocabulary was virtuosic and kinetically chaotic while the video performer was floating in a pool not engaging with her environment in the typical way. I realized that the ‘blindspot’ was negativity so I spray-painted negative words like ‘no’, ‘not’, ‘never’ on the flat that the video was going to be projected on. I’d been taking water aerobics for 2 months in the pool where we did the filming and I happen to notice a sign that said ‘No Diving’ on the wall. I saw a connection – the missing piece of my context that would bring my concept alive. I re-worked the footage, re-shot a few segments and made some minor structural changes to support the context including a dive at the end of the video, which proved an effective ending.

Don’t…Away

This is a solo art/dance collaboration project. I listened to the same music that the visual artist was listening to, spent time studying the paintings which were large-scale on sailboat sails and incorporated inspiration from quotes she sent me that were relevant to the concept. I had a kinaesthetic entrance into the piece but not a visual one and that impeded my intuition to some extent. I filmed a 45-minute improvisation based on the movement ideas I was working with that I felt referenced the concept and edited the sequences as they made sense to me visually. Then I put it back in my body for further kinaesthetic reflection. I was editing and moving, editing and moving until, in the interest of time, I abandoned the editing software and finished making my decisions via movement. I never reached a satisfactory ending but had to perform it. After the art reception, my professor confirmed that she too didn’t think it was finished.

distorted clarity

This was a piece that my colleague and friend, Brooke Schlecte, choreographed through concept and improvisation. We were researching dance as grotesque form and had been saturating ourselves with reading about grotesque form and watching hours of video clips cataloguing relevant samples for our history presentation. We talked a few times about concept and what the other was thinking about. Brooke wanted to put two ideas together: eating disorders and writing on her skin with a marker as an addictive activity. I wanted to use contortion and emoting as a movement qualities. As we talked, we began to see how our ideas could fit together. I had some movement motifs and further ideas but had only improvised some in my living room. She had some motifs and a skeletal structure but that was it. We watched each others movement and reflected on each others ideas. We both began to see some possibilities that we then tried and videotaped. We saw more possibilities and made some changes and repeated the cycle 3 times before we were finished. We both felt we had a complete movement and concept idea that resounded with our intention to create a dance in grotesque form for our history presentation.

we all fall down

This is a 4-minute dance film that was part of a larger 24-minute film. I took a concept from a choreographer about ‘adults at play’ and asked a dancer to improvise swinging, hanging and playing on a monkey bar (with no storyboard). I got inspired by what she was doing and filmed the pebble section and the run away, then asked her to roll down the hill. At the end of the last take, while still filming I saw her knees and feet in the frame and asked her to walk back up the hill. She did and then laid down (which I didn’t ask her to do). Like I said this was part of a larger film and we finished the day having gotten, what I thought, was sufficient footage to make a sketch of something. After seeing the footage, I realized that there was a complete idea there and 3 hours of editing later, we all fall down was finished.

Summary

Critical thinking – pose a problem and set out to solve it. Be reflective and have reasons for every choice you make. It’s okay to not always be able to articulate your reasons for your choices, but pay attention and work toward it.

Engagement is an (re)action: engage with the work on as many levels and from as many perspectives as you can.