For the three Vassar seniors presenting choreography for the Dance Department’s Independent Study showcase, the process was all about collaboration and connection, pulling from the influences around them to create something new. Their evening of work, titled “This made me think of you,” was shown at the Frances Daly Fergusson Theater in Kenyon Hall on April 26, with each piece running about 20 minutes. Maia Beaudry, Dana Tagliaferro, and Nia Bethel-Brescia had each been conceptualizing their pieces since at least December, with the show acting as a kind of culmination of their growth as individuals and as dance-makers at Vassar. Though all three of them had previous choreographic experience, the Independent Study format allowed for a much bigger scope of production, as the choreographers played with lighting, costume changes, and different multimedia elements.
Beaudry’s piece “conversations” opened the show, with two dancers dressed in red and illuminated by a spotlight. They improvised to a live saxophone solo played by Beaudry’s father, seated below the stage alongside her mother, also playing live. This “conversation” between dancer and musician is exactly what Beaudry hoped to explore with her piece. She noted that even before knowing what her piece would be about, she knew it had to have live music.
In addition to her musician parents, Beaudry also enlisted her longtime Vassar friend Thomas Doyle ’25 to play and compose for the performance. Before he played live for the dancers, Beaudry had them rehearse in silence, noting that one of her favorite moments of the rehearsal process was seeing how the dancers responded in their movement to hearing the live music for the first time. Beaudry continued, “[The piece] was also making me think of the longer term influence that my parents and my pianist had on me as a person and a dancer.” She continued by reminiscing on afternoons spent in Raymond parlor listening to Doyle improvise on the piano, adding that she realized her musical influences extended beyond home to the community built at Vassar as well. She said of the experience tying it all together for her piece, “It gave me so much space for play in ways that I didn’t really even know I had so much to say or that so much of what I had to say was inspired by people who were playing or dancing in my piece.”
In the beginning of Tagliaferro’s work “little box,” two dancers dressed in nude sit side by side behind a wooden bench, miming folding laundry as they dance together. Tagliaferro explained that their movements for the section were inspired by mundane household chores: “I really wanted to play with storytelling and also more gestural, pedestrian movements.” Stemming from this focus on the home and everyday intimacies, Tagliaferro’s piece explored the relationships in her life. She chose the duet format, both as a choreographic challenge, and as a tool to examine how we relate to one another.
Expanding on her focus on the duet, Tagliaferro explained, “One section would be like a sibling relationship, or like a mother and child relationship, and that sort of dissolved into just how when I was thinking about this piece I sort of just started thinking about all the initiate relationships in my life and kind of extracting the feelings from those and then just turning that to movement.”
Bethel-Brescia’s work “gift + response” opens with a video of two pairs of hands working on two drawings and conversing about art and creation. The filmed conversation between Bethel-Brescia and her friend Jillian Lin ’25 revisited a previous conversation between the two that inspired the title and theme behind the piece. As they passed the drawings back and forth, each adding, Bethel-Brescia remembers Lin saying, “What we’re doing right now is the theme”: making art without one clear owner, responding to the other while adding your own voice.
The piece also included videos of a talk by cultural theorist Fred Moten, and a music video to “Cranes in the sky” by Solange. Bethel-Brescia collaged these multimedia aspects together with the choreography, saying of the final week of preparation, “It was so much fun to see everything slot together because we had so many different songs and different little pieces of ‘gift + response’ that were separated from each other for ages.”
With the choreographic process, Bethel-Brescia also hoped to create a sense of dance community and collaboration, saying, “I think that was one of my goals with this project too that felt really special and cool to kind of be at the helm of.” When thinking about building her dance space, she reflected on the idea of embodied liberation, noting that while the term may be overused, “I think I know what that feels like, and I really wanted to actually get into that, that free feeling inside of your body, through my choreography. I wanted to share that with people and hopefully give them tools where they can produce that for themselves, just on their own.”
All three choreographers reflected on the importance of the process, with Bethel-Brescia saying, “I just loved rehearsal…In the end, you know the performance is just an hour in the theater, but we’ve spent way more time actually developing the work.” Beaudry added, “Some of the most beautiful pieces of partner work that were rewarding for me to watch were all born out of moments of play in the studio.” Tagliaferro expanded on this process and highlighted something that all three of them shared, saying that for the first time in her choreographic career, she would often show up to rehearsals without a specific phrase, rather ideas or motifs, and see what grew from there.
Tagliaferro concluded, “I feel like this piece is a perfect reflection or an opportunity for me to reflect on my own life, and choreography-wise I definitely think this was a good goodbye to Vassar dance and Vassar as a whole, just because I feel like I’ve grown so much in the past four years.”