Michaela C. Neild works with members of her Dancing Through Difficulty: Embodied Tools for an Ever-Changing World project.
these that became us by Kylee C. Smith
Mental/Body by Jacquie Sochacki Pittman
The Master of Fine Arts in Dance at The Ohio State University is a three-year program. Recognized as a terminal degree, the MFA springs from our studio-centered areas of study: choreography, performance, movement analysis and notation, production and lighting design, and dance and technology. Though the emphasis is on creative work, our program is grounded in academic study and is designed to send graduates out into the field with both depth and breadth of knowledge.
For their capstone experience, MFA students complete and present a substantial MFA project demonstrating a synthesis of craft, artistic vision and conceptual rigor, as well as professional competence in their selected research area. Students document the project with disc and written documentation, presenting one copy to the Department of Dance for the Music and Dance Library. The MFA oral examination includes a discussion and defense of the synthesis of craft, artistic vision and conceptual rigor as demonstrated in the project.
2022 MFA Candidate Michaela C. Neild’s project Dancing Through Difficulty: Embodied Tools for an Ever-Changing World offers online integrated arts programming for adults 50 years and over. “The mission of the Dancing Through Difficulty project is to provide accessible artistic experiences for aging adults that promote self-discovery, address health disparities and transform our local communities,” says Neild. “This project explores the body as a toolbox for building individual and community wellness through movement exercises (or embodied tools) which practice life skills for navigating the turbulent and uncertain future of our ever-changing world. Throughout the project, members engage in weekly dance classes and monthly workshops in creative writing, poetry, painting, collage and music skills.” Neild’s project is generously funded by the Albert-Schweitzer Fellowship, the Vera Blaine Special Project Fund, the Graduate Research Small Grant and the Helen Alkire Dance Fund. For more information, visit www.dancingthroughdifficulty.com.
MFA Candidate Kylee C. Smith's project these that became us opens a curated multimedia archival installation for public viewing on January 18, 2022, at Ohio State’s Urban Arts Space (UAS) Gallery in downtown Columbus, Ohio. The installation culminates with a screening of a dance film and a lecture demonstration of a danced ritual practice on January 28, 2022. This follows the creation of a site-specific danced ritual at charged ancestral sites in Abbeville County, South Carolina, filmed in October 2021. Along with collaborators, Smith visited these sites in order to engage their devised ritual work as well as create a dance film of the ritual on location. In this project, she seeks to not only connect to her own ancestors, but to also encourage those who engage the work to call upon their ancestors as well. The work spans Ohio and South Carolina as sites that transform public ancestral artifacts into sacred, transformative, and intimate conduits for spiritual shifts and asks how improvisation can be more than abstraction or a tool for making and is a method of deepening into spirituality as a critical piece of ritual art making. As a curated archival installation, audiences will interact with collected videos, images, and objects arranged in the UAS gallery and will be invited to consider the archives which are part of their own family histories and the templates or rituals by which they might engage with them and connect with their own lineages.
MFA Candidate Jacquie Sochacki Pittman will be sharing her choreographic research project, Mental/Body, through a lecture-demonstration and an experiential performance. Her project explores the physical bodily manifestation of mental illness through choreography and performance. She utilizes emotionally-inclusive rehearsal processes with the goal of restructuring the hierarchy of art-making in dance spaces. “Since we have been working together, the dancers and I have come to trust and know each other through our emotionally-inclusive practices,” says Sochacki Pittman. “These practices look like check-ins, visual art exploration, and discussions about how anxiety shows up in our lives. This work has led to friendships and meaningful, collaborative relationships. I am looking forward to sharing our teamwork and resiliency through performance.” Mental/Body will premiere first as a lecture-demonstration during Ohio State Dance’s Community Conversations on Wednesday February 23 at 12:15PM in Sullivant Hall, Studio 390. This piece will then live as an intimate performance setting composed of 6 dancers, live musicians, and about 20 audience members in the ACCAD Motion Lab at 7:00PM on March 3, 4 and 5, 2022. Sochacki Pittman’s project is funded by The Graduate School’s Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship (AGGRS) Program.
Third-year MFA Candidate Isaiah Harris also presents an MFA project in spring 2022. Watch our events page for details.
The second-year MFA cohort of eight undertook an ambitious group collaborative project entitled Inevitable Circling: the work of dreams that was designed for the Urban Arts Space downtown, blending and layering their diverse backgrounds, skills and aspirations. This was not a required element of their program but grew spontaneously out of their first-year cohort bonding during covid. We welcome the four first year MFA's and are excited to see their slant in their new work.
