In 2013, I was invited by Professor Jane Green to present my choreography at Northern Kentucky University. I was thrilled to bring a group of ETSU students to perform The Physics of a Teardrop, A Line in the Sand, and Get Me There. Photo Credit: Mikki Schaffner
About The Physics of a Teardrop
I went to the studio and began working with the movement of a hand covering the eye and with it, the idea of tears falling from the eye. Then I asked myself, “How many ways can I physicalize the act of crying?” Once I felt I exhausted every aspect of crying (exploring the shape and quality of a tear; what it would look like if I physicalized weeping with other parts of the body, say my elbow for example; the shuddering shoulders when sobbing; the breath as it holds back the tears, and so on) and through extension, expansion and connection of these movements together, the beginnings of a dance started to take shape.[i] I then put to use the choreographic device of canon (dancers performing the same movement one after the other) to represent the falling of tears one after another.
I then narrowed my perspective. I wanted to study a specific moment in time when we feel a lump in the throat and a tear rising to the surface and we ask ourselves, “Should I really let go and allow the emotion to flow or do I hold back and only permit myself to let a single tear fall?” By thinking of the physical properties of the teardrop, rather than the emotion leading to the teardrop, I found the tears themselves created cold and mysterious shapes. The dancers began as the embodiment of a teardrop. At the climax of the dance, the dancers expressed the human emotion of crying.
[i] In her book, Dance Composition Basics: Capturing the Choreographer’s Craft, Pamela Anderson Sofras states, “In dance, gestures are abstracted. The quality of the gesture rather than the literal gesture becomes important,” (13). Her exercise on dance gesture provided the springboard for my exploratory movement work in the early stages of choreographing The Physics of a Teardrop.
Work Cited:
Sofras, Pamela. Dance Composition Basics: Capturing the Choreographers Craft. Human Kinetics, 2006.