My research began with the study of animal movement in the form of watching existing video found online of animal observations in the wild. I saw extensive videos of Jane Goodall working with chimpanzees in Gombe, hidden camera observations of dozens of different animals in the wild. There is an entire YouTube category for pets and animals. Animals are interesting to humans. From various videos involving behaviors in a species, behaviors between species, I watched animals play, eat, sleep, fight, die, lounge, mate, and dance. The movement involved with all of these elements is fascinating and sometimes difficult to transcribe to a human body. From translating some movement, I then researched what others have done in animal performances. This brought me to several articles about various performances, in which animals are anthropomorphized via puppets or animal costumes, such as Edwina Ashton and Mark Rudkin’s “Beauty Spot.” Similar instances can be seen throughout popular culture, from the Animal Planet television station, with observations of animals, to children’s shows with people in animal costumes to cartoons in which there are no human characters, only animals that behave like humans.
My original ideas included a study on the bizarre of the animal world – exotic relationships between species, bizarre animals from remote locations and habitats – if somehow these relationships could be expressed on stage, it would be very interesting to work on. But upon reading about amazing coral organisms or the fish at the bottom of the ocean, it dawned on me that the most peculiar animal out there is none other than Homo sapiens. Man’s place in the world is a peculiar one. Human existence has taken its toll on the planet, and on all other species on it. Several performances have used animals to help define what humans do in the world, and, more importantly, what humans should be doing with the planet.
My current research focus is on the impact of human behavior on the planet - ranging from interactions with other humans, other animals, and the entity that is the environment – to research on what makes someone or some animal wild or tame, or somewhere in between. What does it mean to be a wild person? A tame person? How do people fit into society? How do perceptions of people as wild or tame reflect what a society thinks of animals? Is nature meant to be tamed?
Instead of just mimicking what exists in nature, I realized that humans are in a different category. They defy nature and create their own world completely, imposing an unnatural world on themselves for benefits of convenience. I must focus my dramaturgy into specific issues and images regarding human life. In Paris, I would like to see how the art culture there has expressed the following:
I would like to explore animals, nature and the earth as the ever apparent “Other”. Additionally, seeing animal representation in historic European art will be helpful to my development of this project: I will look for references that expand or focus on ideas of wildness, domestication in the human and animal worlds, or human-animal interaction on a global scale (always keeping in mind the importance of both a microscopic and macroscopic perspective).
Phase III in Melisey will include creating my own animal representations in choreography. I will explore new ways to represent humans, perhaps from an animal viewpoint--invoking a double inversion of human-animal perspective, because such views are always filtered through human interpretations of how humans think animals might think.