When dance meets fine arts: a cross-disciplinary educational experiment

Choreography is a way dance writes its narrative in time and within space through movement explorations and choreographic tools. During second semester of academic year 2021/22, Susan Yeung (Dance) and Gilles Massot (Fine Arts) co-taught the improvisation and choreography class for Diploma in Dance Level 1 students at LASALLE College of the Arts. While Gilles’ work explores the expression of time and space through the contrasting medium of painting and photography, his teaching approach provided a different perspective that expands the scope of choreographic conceptualisation through various tasks between dance and fine arts.
With the aim of cultivating an inquiring mind towards dance making, dance students develop the ability to analyse the compositional choices and create expressions through the understanding of their bodies and choreographic tools. Based on the concept of “motif”, an element commonly used in all creative practices for the development of artistic ideas, various frameworks related to abstraction and deconstruction were introduced through the coursework. By researching the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky as the starting point, the students experimented movement concepts through various play and improvisation. The narrative of the choreography was further developed and enriched by artistic experiments such as dérive from situationist movement, dynamic graph improvisation, collective mind mapping and props study. The students’ experience was further expanded through a drumming painting workshop and collaboration with BA(Hons) Fine Arts Level 1 students. Students’ final group works reflected an interesting range of movement concepts and vocabulary, as well as the ability to generate creative expression through the embodied experience.