A sculpture of doors, and how “our bodies are actually our homes,” inspired Elon University assistant professor Lauren Kearns to write a winning proposal for a dance piece to headline a fall concert at the North Carolina Dance Alliance Annual Event.
The Annual Event, which runs Oct. 17-19 in Roxboro, N.C., brings together the dance community in North Carolina for a weekend of seminars, performances and discussions. The NCDA is a professional organization for dance that holds conferences and outreach programs, serves as a non-profit umbrella and gives student scholarships.
“Coming Home” is the theme for this year’s conference. Kearns proposed a piece related to the theme and started her work by researching doors and neighborhoods through art, literature and poetry. She also looked at current news articles, some dealing with the movement to restore neighborhoods.
What intrigued her about Donald Lipski’s sculpture, “The Doors,” and about using doors as a design element is that a door can represent figurative exploration and open passages, and literal homes and neighborhoods.
Working with assistant professor Bill Webb on set design and lighting, Kearns said she hopes to use set pieces as video projection screens. The video and iconic images projected onto set pieces would collectively represent the neighborhood.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about how our bodies are actually our homes,” she said. “The neighborhood we live in is our actual body. … Home is where your story begins. Your story begins in your body.”
Kearns will interview each of the dancers about the neighborhoods they grew up in and then compile their stories to be spoken throughout the piece.
After storyboarding her 15- to 20-minute, three-movement piece, Kearns will select or have music composed by offering a few words like “theatrical, poignant yet vivid, fluid and athletic, layered and complex,” to describe her piece. Hearing a small clip of the music will help her guide the composer in the right direction.
Adjunct professor Amy Beasley is Kearns’ lead dancer, and supporting Beasley are three alumni: Katie Lester ’07, Kristen Owens ’08 and Sara Dunham ’08. A fifth dancer will be added.
Kearns said she hopes the premiere of her piece will strengthen the reputation of her professional project-oriented dance company, kearns dance project. The group employs new dancers – mostly Elon alumni – for each different project.
Kearns is working on a second piece this summer for the North Carolina Dance Tour, and she was just elected to serve a three-year term on the National Board of Directors of the American College Dance Festival Association representing the Mid-Atlantic region. She was also elected to serve a two-year term on the Board of Directors of the NCDA.
And she presented an interactive workshop, “We Dance: an autobiographical dance-making tool to invoke personal empowerment,” at the 10th annual National Dance Education Conference at Towson University in Maryland in late June.
Elon’s enthusiasm for the performing arts and its support of creative research are what Kearns appreciates about the university and what attracted her to the school. It can be problematic when artists are educators, she said, because of the limited time for outside work.
“The administration is 100 percent behind artistic scholarship,” she said. “Elon will be a role model for artistic scholarship.”
– Written by Ashley Barnas ‘10