LUCY McMAHON

Solo dance and video created as part of my MFA in Choreography and performed at 'Sprung', the annual Queens Dance Company show. The piece was light hearted metaphor for writing a PhD . During fieldwork, people leave all kinds of marks on you, leaving you with multiple complex and non-linear ideas that you then have to squash into the academic constraints of a written thesis. The video shows the process of arbitrarily cutting out shapes, regulating what was originally a many-layered, dynamic experience, irreducible to the written word. The dance is an embodied version of the same metaphor - it shows the attempts to escape from the rigidities of dance technique, and the inevitable failure that comes from trying to express something through someone else's language.