capstone project
For my senior capstone project, I choreographed a piece titled "Tomorrow Needs You."
My cast included all 16 company dancers.
I decided to make suicide awareness my overall dance's theme because I knew I wanted it to be something relevant and meant something to people. I chose this theme because a close family member of mine committed suicide, which did make my family and myself go through some difficult moments. The way I edited the music I wanted a quote in between two songs which were silhouette by Aquilo and listen before I go by Billie Eilish and the quote is "I made the mistake of assuming that in all of these situations that people were fine that because they were talking about pain with humor, they were okay.’’ This quote was taken from a TED lecture about suicide prevention. Living with the guilt that you could have done more is difficult. I wanted this dance to express this struggle.
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Coming up with the dance was hard because I knew what I wanted on specific parts of the music the only problem was filling that gap with choreography. I also knew that I wanted a lead and I wanted her to represent the hardships someone faces and no one notices that they are going through it until it's too late. I auditioned for my lead and picked Angie Diaz Lopez because she gave this beautiful emotion that I seek and I knew I wanted her as my lead. I wanted her to have a solo in the beginning before the other dancers added on to represent the struggle a person faces when they are on their own. This performance factor was great but in the beginning, when I was barely teaching my piece it was very difficult to teach it and my castmates weren't really picking up the movement because this piece was mostly based on technique which is something we lack. But even though I knew this piece was hard I knew it would look beautiful.
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In any situation, there is always something you can reflect on and wish you did better on for me it was finding more time to clean my piece. Because there was a certain point where nobody really knew my dance and it just needed a lot of cleaning in the end it was coming together but I think I needed one more rehearsal to clean my piece and go over small details. I think that the idea of me getting more time to clean my piece would have improved my project.
