Research Description:

Dancing Beyond Boundaries: Technology Meets Dance

Research with the University Scholars Program is giving me the chance not only to learn about technological advances, but also how they relate and affect the dance world. My involvement with Digital World's Dancing Beyond Boundaries during the fall semester of last year helped me to understand the need to collaborate technology with dance in this fast-paced, evermore electronic world.

In my recent studies, with the help of Matthew Smith, a graduate from UCF in television production, I have been learning about camera equipment and looking at dance from different angles with different equipment in hopes of finding ways to make a visually more enhanced 3-dimensional video. This summer I was able to tour with The People's Touring Project, which was co-directed by my mentor, Kelly Drummond Cawthon and Adele Myers from Tulane University. We traveled to New Orleans, Jacksonville, Gainesville, and New York City. During this time, I was able to video some of the rehearsals and performances experimenting with the filming process and learning about the complexity of videoing such vigorous 3-Dimentional movements. Exploring aspects of video such as editing and execution could be very helpful in order for me to understand our further studies coming in the fall semester.

As the fall semester begins, we will be working to continue our research with dance and technology with a project in conjunction with Kelli Dipple. We are working with both the Engineering department and the Digital Worlds Institute to further study last fallís Dancing Beyond Boundaries, which explored dance performance and Internet 2 technology. We aim to investigate new possibilities of dance, using digital technology in collaboration with choreography and dance, with the help of the Digital Worlds Institute. I look forward to the research that is soon to come.