Students from three different departments on campus will come together to showcase their final projects during a single event.
Collaborama, hosted Thursday in Morgan Auditorium from 5-7 p.m., will showcase the talents of students from Robin Behn’s creative writing class, Sarah Barry’s undergraduate dance program and Sarah Marshall’s printmaking class.
“We did a lot of collaborations this semester – some with just writers, some with visual artists and now this with dancers,” Kristen Kuczenski, a student in the creative writing class, said. “At the beginning, everyone showed up with their own specific talents and interests, so we had to navigate a way to making that all mesh together properly.”
Collaborama serves as a final project for the three classes, which were scheduled to allow students to collaborate during the same period each day. Their goal was to come up with a presentation that actively used the talents of numerous group members.
“Coming up with a concept as a group felt really organic since we spent so much time together,” Santhi Tsingosa, another student in the creative writing class, said.
Each of the collaborative groups included members drawn from each of the three classes, creating a diverse and flexible method of developing new concepts.
“Our project works with leaves,” Ben Bailey, a student in the printmaking class, said. “We looked at the changing of seasons and how to best illustrate that. So we used colorful leaves on printed paper as props for the dances. All of us even learned some dancing, but if anything, we’re just there to propel the other dancers forward.”
The show will feature a number of dances, each crafted individually by the groups with topics ranging from comedy to character-driven narrative, and will be set to both music and the spoken word. Outside the auditorium, a gallery will be set up to display artwork brought in by students, encompassing everything from storybooks to caption sequences – all original works by students from the classes.
The show is free and open to the public. Many of the collaborations have been in the works for months, if not the entire semester.
