Reflections is a dance I choreographed and performed on February 25, 2022 in studio 205 Campus Center Building at East Tennessee State University. The dance explores the relationship between a dancer’s mind and body and uses mirrors and repetition to express the dancers’ perception of their flaws and insecurities. The following thesis, Reflections: Battling Body Image as a Dancer, analyzes the artistic elements of the choreographic process, my experiences as a dance student at ETSU from 2018-2022, as well as my training in my youth. My research for this thesis involves exploring the history and craft of choreography including the fundamentals of Laban Movement Analysis. In addition, my research includes a survey concerning body dysmorphia in dancers. In theory and practice, I accepted the challenge of stepping outside my comfort zone to create an emotional and physical dance composition that serves to demonstrate a dancer fighting a battle with body image.

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This dissertation engages Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin and his movement language Gaga as significant and celebrated in the world of dance in the contemporary moment. Naharin’s choreography and Gaga present significant contradictions that ultimately reveal important tensions at work in the category of the contemporary. I unpack what I identify to be five tensions in place. First, Gaga is discursively and critically described as a style and technique, yet Naharin rejects these classifications. Second, Naharin disavows politics in his choreography, yet his work cannot be separated from the politics of his and Batsheva’s home base in the State of Israel. The third tension can be found within the language and principles of Gaga itself as a practice of producing and managing embodied contradiction. Fourth, Naharin claims Gaga as a universally accessible “toolbox” for all movers and all other forms of dance, yet it is uniquely personal. Its applicability to other forms of dance reveals important paradoxes in older genres of dance as they endure in the twenty-first century. Fifth, as a practice marketed separately to “dancers” and “people,” Gaga problematizes the distinction between high art concert dance and popular dance. Ultimately, this project demonstrates the significance of Gaga as a movement practice. The context of its development and deployment, its particular dynamic aesthetic, and the way it circulates among communities of professional dancers and non-dancers all point to the complexities of this form that exemplify the complexities of the contemporary as a multi-faceted category and signifier.This research is foregrounded in my experiences as a professional dancer taking Gaga classes, workshops and intensives in New York City and Tel Aviv from 2011-2016, and backed by research in the field of dance studies, critical reviews, rhetorical and discursive analysis, and close readings of Naharin’s choreography and of Gaga movement. This research engages the complexities in the relationship between these aesthetic, rhetorical, discursive, and embodied contradictions and the contemporary as the label holding them together. I ask how Naharin and Gaga articulate the contradictory terms of this elusive category. This project furthers the academic discourse on Gaga and Naharin as well as broader scholarly studies of popular dance and concert dance practices and aesthetics of the twenty-first century. / Dance

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Embracing stasis is a performance questioning and exploring certain notions of force and attack in interaction with tenderness and care. It seeks to approach and illuminate moments of simultaneous presence or correlation between these elements and focuses on their transitional zones. The work is navigated by a curiosity about situations that could be both offensive confrontations and encounters of care. Situations of stasis, as dynamic situations of equally opposing forces are aimed for and met through an urge for tangibility. By working with the idea of form as possible carrier of diverse qualities, Martial Arts practices supply the process.

The use of audio recording and playback as a way of consuming music has become as widely accepted as the use of a concert stage. Many professional classical ensembles task themselves with producing recordings regularly. At the same time, it is becoming more necessary for performing musicians to have the skills and understanding of recording technology to create their own content and evaluate their playing and the playing of others. While many publications provide detailed knowledge and assistance for recording violins, guitars, and voices, little attention has been given to the bassoon. The historical context for how the bassoon has developed within the realm of recorded music remains unexplored. Additionally, the acoustic characteristics of the bassoon are oftentimes generalized with the qualities of other woodwind instruments, and the techniques employed by audio engineers and recording studios are not analyzed in the context of the instrument’s unique properties. The purpose of this paper is to provide bassoonists and audio engineers with a more comprehensive understanding of how the bassoon performance behaves in the recorded environment. Information regarding historical background, instrumental acoustics, and recording techniques will be compiled and uniquely centered around the experience of recording the bassoon. In addition, observational analysis of recorded performances will verify hypotheses made by the compiled research and demonstrate how recordings may be analyzed through the lens of this newly acquired information. The result of this research is a collection of unique instances, from both the past and present, of interaction between bassoon performance and the recorded medium which have otherwise been unappreciated. / Music Performance

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