(1) What is your essential question, and what are your answers? What is your best answer and why?
- My essential question is, "What is the most important factor in making a choreographed dance piece?"
- My three answers are , 1) "the amount of time that's being put into the process of choreographing a dance piece." 2) "the amount of effort that a dancer put into each movement." 3) "the initial emotional connection that you make when listening to a song."
- In my opinion, I believe that my first answer is the best choice. Although all of the other answers have great significance in regards to the outcome of a dance piece, by putting more time into the process you are able to perfect a piece in more ways than the other two answers combined.
(2) What process did you take to arrive at this answer?
- What really helped me get to this answer comes directly from my last two interviews. In both my interview 3 & 4, they had stated when asked that the most important factor when choreographing/dancing is practice. The only way to get better is to put time and effort into your dancing and then from there I got this inspiration and made it revolve more around my essential question.
(3) What problems did you face? How did you resolve them?
- My main problems that I faced directly revolved around the fact that I had no idea what to research in the beginning. Dance was such a broad category that I couldn't distinguish what it was that I directly wanted to research. However, I was able to resolve this matter by asking myself what it was that really intrigued me about dance. What really attracts me the most about dance is being able to create something that you could be proud of and that's why I chose to focus on the choreography aspect of dance. This allowed me to tackle different aspects and perspectives in which choreography can actually be done.
(4) What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?
- The two main sources that I used were the Parallel Processes in Writing and Choreography by Amy Larimer and Feedback Facial Expressions and Emotions by Costanza Navarretta.
- The Larimer article really helped me in regards to the realization that dance is an art form that's just as complex as something like writing a novel. There are so many similarities that I even started to refer to dance as storytelling several times in my I-Search paper.
- The Navarretta article really helped me because it helped me see dance in a more emotional aspect and that's how I then chose to approach dance throughout the year. I saw dance as more than just a sport from then on.
