UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- They were pushed to their limits, leaving the dance studio each day sore and tired after jumping off structures and learning moves they initially doubted they were capable of doing. But the Penn State dance students loved every second. After an intensive 10-day collaboration in California this summer with Los Angeles-based Diavolo Dance Theatre Company, Penn State student and faculty participants said they eagerly await the start of fall semester to put what they learned into action on the University Park campus.
“It was a lot harder than we all expected,” Cristina Pesce, a junior kinesiology major from Lincoln University, Pa., said. Four other members of the University Dance Company -- Tiffany Bierly, Rebecca Miller, Megan Bailey and Bromlyn Fitzgerald -- joined Pesce in Los Angeles.
“They bring out the best in you without you knowing you can do it,” Pesce said. “Two hours in we were ready to collapse, but they teach you that you need to be ready for what they’ll give you. It pulls out your inner athlete.”
Pesce said dancers need to possess both athletic and artistic skills to be successful at the Diavolo technique. “You have to be the best of both worlds,” she said.
While in Los Angeles, all 10 University Park students participated in a daylong Diavolo intensive session, learning about the company’s technique. The five dance students continued with the intensive for the week while the four architecture majors and one student from the Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship program explored public and pedestrian spaces in Los Angeles and other parts of southern California. All the students took an aerial dance class and attended the Hollywood Fringe Festival. The dance students, synthesizing what they had learned in Los Angeles, performed with Diavolo members on the last evening of the intensive. Watch a video of that performance at http://vimeo.com/26522923 online.
Each day for the student dancers began with a 90-minute warm-up led by a Diavolo member, followed by the morning creative session. The first two days were about building a skill set that could be used to create the showcase piece. Diavolo built four skate ramps that roll around the stage to use in The Secret Life of Public Spaces project, an 18-month collaboration with the Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State and university partners created with funding from a $200,000 Creative Campus Innovations Grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The intensive focused on students using the ramps throughout the week.
While the dance students were earning their aches and pains, the other Penn Staters were hard at work observing, sketching and putting a lot of miles on their rented car.
“Looking at public and pedestrian spaces in Los Angeles and southern California provided us with a wide range of experiences to draw upon, everything from the mixing of the tribes on Venice Beach and Venice Promenade, to the United States-Mexico border crossing to Santa Monica Pier,” said Marcus Shaffer, assistant professor of architecture. Shaffer and Elisha Clark Halpin, associate professor of dance and head of the dance department, accompanied the students on the trip.
“The mix of people, machines, topography and the ritual performance of everyday actions like walking was right there in our faces,” Shaffer said. “We saw great, vital, lively public space that was incredibly nuanced in its design and saw broken, ill-designed pedestrian space at the border that was deeply disturbing.”
Shaffer said he and the students on his team discovered a new level of appreciation for the dancers.
“Stepping into the dancers’ world was a real eye opener in terms of how hard they work, how they create, how their language translates into architecture/landscape architecture speak and the immense potential they bring to the project through their training and intense awareness of movement,” he said.
Students Veronica Patrick, Lily Meier, Mark Haney and Michael Minchin participated in Shaffer’s architecture group. Patrick, a junior from Indiana, Pa., said all the students on the trip became a team and were interested in what everyone was learning.
“Everyone got along really well and all involved share a huge commitment to the success of this project,” Patrick said. “For the most part during the day we had separate agendas, but when everyone got together for events like Diavolo meetings, an aerial arts class, a Fringe Festival show, dinners and just nights at the house we were excited to hear about each others’ days and discuss thoughts and ideas for how what we were learning could come to influence our overall collaborative project.”
As the only student participant from the Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship program, Rachel Suffian was allowed to participate in dance or architecture-related activities. She mainly chose the architecture-related activities, which included visits to Walt Disney Concert Hall, Getty Center, Griffith Observatory, the Museum of Contemporary Art and other destinations.
“I now have a different way of looking at buildings and how people walk around them,” said Suffian, a film and video major. “It was interesting how adding a prop or an architectural element changes how people walk and how a building feels. I never thought about it like that.”
Now that the trip is over, Suffian said she is looking forward to how the project progresses.
“I have a better idea what the project will look like, and I have more of a sense of what will be going on,” she said.
Diavolo’s artistic personnel will visit Penn State in fall and spring semesters to help inspire students in the creation of their own work. The project will result in two artistic works. A site-specific three-part student dance performance -- with structures made by the students -- will start at University Park’s Old Main, continue to State College’s Sunset Park and end in The Arboretum at Penn State. Diavolo will perform a world-premiere work, co-commissioned by the Center for the Performing Arts, April 19 at Eisenhower Auditorium.
French-born Jacques Heim, who serves as artistic director, founded Diavolo in 1992.
“We gained many tools over the week that we will unpack in the fall and make our own,” Halpin said. “I think the importance of the life lessons from the intensive far outweigh the value of the tricks the students learned. While the students were immersed in the Diavolo creative process in terms of working with sets and props, they were not able to be at the place of actually functioning in that process without understanding what Jacques expects. He demands that the dancers solve the problems or issues that arise during the creation of the piece.”
Led by Amy Dupain Vashaw, director of audience and program development at the Center for the Performing Arts, The Secret Life of Public Spaces faculty team includes Shaffer; Halpin; Peter Aeschbacher, associate professor of landscape architecture and architecture; Khanjan Mehta, director of the Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship program; and Timothy Simpson, professor of mechanical and industrial engineering and director of the Learning Factory.
Learn more about The Secret Life of Public Spaces at http://creativecampus.psu.edu/ online.