Architecture and dance were brought together in a not-so-common pairing at Muncie's ArtsWalk on March 3.
Thirteen dancers and 12 architecture majors were able to collaborate on the Space in Motion project, which was held in the old Cintas building.
Architecture professor George Elvin’s studio class was working on the semester-long project, and Elvin contacted dance professor Susan Koper with the idea of collaborating.
Elvin said this project brought together three elements that are critical but normally not brought together — design build, interdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement. Architecture students normally do not get to build their designs or work with others.
“It’s amazing to see it come together. … It’s so unusual for the architecture students [to do this],” Elvin said. “This project is especially wonderful because it brought all three [of those elements] together.”
Each architecture student designed a structure after analyzing data of the dancers’ movements in a simulation lab. The dancers could then do improvised choreography while interacting with their structure.
“It was different than how we normally think of dance," Sawyer Harvey, a sophomore dance major, said. "A lot of it was just exploring and finding new ways to interact with our structures. … It caused us to be really inventive and creative, which is something we’re always excited to do."
Junior dance major Rachael Wieczorek had worked with architecture students before, but she had never seen or interacted with the final project that was created.
Maggie Pendergast, a junior architecture major, built the structure Wieczorek danced with. She incorporated action-reaction dancing by having Wieczorek pull on strings with her limbs to manipulate the structure.
“We normally don’t get to explore with physical objects — it’s more like our body is our instrument," Wieczorek said. "So taking time to explore the physical structure and how something that was already created to move with us and how we can manipulate it to move was so incredible."
Cat Wilmes, a junior architecture major, used wire in her structure to mimic her dancer’s movement. The four-rectangle enclosure allowed Wilmes' dancer to grab and dance through the wires while also spreading paint with her feet at the base of the structure. This project was her first design build.
“We’re used to just designing on computers and never actually getting our hands dirty,” Wilmes said. “The dancer moving inside it makes [the structure] come to life. … We’re always putting scale figures into our little buildings and this is, like, a real person.”
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