This year has been full of love and growth, and completing my finals could not be any more bittersweet. I have had the opportunity to learn so much about myself, and about those whom I will be spending the next three years with in my BFA Family. I have developed new perspectives and honed into my deepest interests in order to further investigate the path that I hope to take in years to come. It flew by much too fast, but I have no complaints – it was truly a year to remember.

In Composition I, we were assigned a final project which focused on this growth. As movers and artists, we all have a comfort zone, a bubble in which we feel we can move naturally and organically. As an attempt to continue this growth throughout the last few weeks of the semester, we were assigned to look into these tendencies and oppose them in our movement. Essentially, we were being assigned to go out of our comfort zone and challenge ourselves to develop a new movement vocabulary.

After discussion with my peers, it was decided that my three tendencies which I would oppose were slow, interstitial movement, a performance-ready facial expression, and my tendency to do floor-work which involves a “butt-roll.” After much pondering, I decided to use the following movement styles in order to oppose these tendencies (in respective order): fast, arteriole movement, lack of facial expression/ “dead” face, and floor-work in which my backside does not touch the ground at all.

To further challenge us in this final assignment, our solos were translated into a duet, myself being paired with Marissa Thomas. I think that in this partnership, we were able to challenge each other and provide each other with the necessary feedback which resulted in a substantial amount of growth. I could not have asked for a better way to end my Freshman year and I look forward to exploring this new movement vocabulary further in order to diversify my compositional tool kit.