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As both graduate students and the graduate office gear up for the 2012 Manifest project, PGA: Please Generate Art, I cannot help but think of my own involvement in the first ever PGA project last year.

Last year I attended one of the informal Manifest: PGA meetings with a fellow peer, Courtney St. Clair.  We had no idea what Manifest was, but we knew we wanted to be involved.  After listening to how the graduate office was hoping to collaboratively construct an interactive “golf course” that consisted of nine “holes,” Courtney and I knew exactly what we wanted to do.

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Courtney and I both enjoy contact improvisation, a form of dance, and have attended the Chicago Contact Improvisation jam held every Sunday.  We wanted to incorporate contact improvisation into our hole proposal, and thus “Bodyscape” was born.  With the use of contact improvisation, we wanted to create a landscape of bodies.  The movers moving in the “hole” or space would be both the environment itself, as well as explorers of this environment.  Not only that, but we wanted to utilize themes found in dance/movement therapy: the use of touch, mirroring, kinesthetic empathy, weight share, etc.

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After our proposal was accepted, we hit the ground running.  We found costumes, scheduled rehearsals with our fellow DMT & C peers, and began constructing the set of “Bodyscape.”  Knowing our visual art limitations as dancers, Courtney elicited help from Nikolas Burkhart.  Nikolas is not only a friend of Courtney, but also a visual artist who painted the scenery of “Bodyscape.”  Although the dancers made the the piece come alive, Nikolas’ painting is what really made “Bodyscape” beautiful.

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Creating “Bodyscape” took a lot of time and effort on top of an already very busy graduate student schedule, but it was totally worth it.  Working on “Bodyscape” last spring actually helped me and my fellow artist, Courtney, sustain ourselves through a grueling DMT & C semester.  Courtney and I plan on collaborating again this year, and hopefully our proposal will be accepted.  If not, I still plan on being involved in Manifest: PGA 2012 somehow.