“Tabula Rasa – The mind before it receives the impressions gained from experience”
I was lucky enough to meet with Kristin Yancy and Joshua Hasam, the creative masterminds behind the collaborative dance performance that debuted this weekend in the Annelise Mertz Dance Studio in Mallinckrodt. “Tabula Rasa” was Josh’s senior honors thesis, and Kristin’s senior project. Nine undergraduates – 8 girls and 1 guy – danced in the show, and Kristin and Josh had (spectacular) cameo appearances.
HC: Tell me about the idea of Tabula Rasa. Can you explain the concept behind having the dancers write a word on their bodies as a part of the performance?
Josh: My thesis started off about identity – how identity is perceived by others and how we perceive ourselves. I heard this song called “Tabula Rasa” and I really liked the phrase so I looked it up and I learned that it meant blank slate. The song was supposed to be the big finale piece.
Kristin: But the song is not that great (laughs) so we ended up changing the finale piece. But the name, or at least the idea, stuck.
Josh: There is a social theory called, “social epistemology,” which is the idea that we are all born as a blank slate, and we are influenced by our surroundings and by the people in our lives. All of that shapes our identity. I wanted each of the dancers to be a blank slate – that’s sort of how the writing got tied in.
Kristin: I kept calling it an onion show, because each piece in the show is a different layer. By the end, all the dancers are wearing nude; the choreography is less aggressive, less in your face. It’s very retrograde – it’s as if the dancers are peeling away those layers until they get in that blank slate of being.
Josh: And each dancer selected the word that they wrote on themselves. It goes along with the idea of the self – I wanted them to think of something [a word] personal to them. Then they generated their own movement; I sort of tweaked it, but it was essentially all from the individual.
Kristin: In the last phrase of the show, Josh made us write down words to describe ourselves and we had to generate movements that went along with those ideas. Everyone chose their own words.
Josh: I didn’t know what words the dancers chose. I think some ended up being resilient, dreamer, flux, artistic, loyal, openness…
HC: How was it collaborating on the choreography together?
Kristin: The second section of the first half – the male solo – and the group piece when the dancers were in all black – all of that was Josh’s choreography. I choreographed the dance when the dancers were wearing tutus. Besides any solo material, those are the only cases that we worked completely by ourselves. The rest was collaborative.
Josh: We would just go to the studio and mess around with choreography. We started working with dancers in October, but we started choreographing at the very beginning of this year.
Kristin: We know each other well enough to be able to say “No” and move on to the next thing. We know each other’s style well, and I know how I dance and I know how Josh dances, so it was easy for us to integrate material. It made collaborating much simpler.
HC: They had to turn people away from the show on both Friday and Saturday night. I barely got in on Saturday! Were you expecting such a turnout?
Josh: When we first sent out the invitation on Facebook, my roommate was like, “You can’t invite 1,000 people to a show that only holds 50 people max!” On retrospect, I would have added a third show.
Kristin: We were way over capacity both nights! But it was hard to know whether people would show up, but I think it was helpful that the show was so short, and it was free. We weren’t really sure how many people were going to come. It was exciting!
Personally, I would have been more than willing to see Tabula Rasa for a second (or third) time because the pieces were so provocative and emotional. Josh and Kristin’s cameo piece was raw and powerful, but my favorite piece was probably when the dancers wore tutus. Their movements exuded strength and intensity, and they seemed to be having a lot of fun. The writing component of the performance was interesting and gave the audience insight into the choreographers’ visions and the dancers’ personalities.
Both Josh and Kristin will graduate in May – Josh with a degree in Dance, and Kristin with a degree in Comparative Arts.