Dance, Architecture and Society: Using Social Psychology to Explore the 'why' of Artistic Creativity in a Socio-Cultural Context

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Through dance and architecture society is interpreted and presented to the social audience. Art, life and inspiration share a closely linked, symbiotic relationship. Art inspires life and life inspires art; what the artist chooses to actualize consummates the trust placed in his/her hand by society. Using 'symbolic interactionism' this paper attempts to define collective memory, politics and heritage that define artists and their works. An exploration of African American modern dance and Jewish Deconstructivist Architecture. ‘Symbolic interactionism,’ began as an offhand comment by social phychologist Herbert Blumer in an article he contributed to Man and Society. Blumer’s idea is especially relevant to evolving concepts in modern dance and deconstructivist architecture. As choreographers and architects search for meaning, strength and self-expression, they invite society at large to experience their reasoning, method, end product, and commonality of experience. In essence they are social psychologists. They can use art to engender artistic expression as a way to explain society. Through the application of ‘symbolic interactionism,’ we take a topical look at society through the lens of modern dance and deconstructivist architecture. Node one focuses on the political and historical relevance of Africans in the New World, node two explores aesthetics, ethnicity and identity and node three focuses on forerunners and trailblazers in their respective fields as archetypes, “people who … have never bartered the fierce freedom of their souls, never strangled their hunger for rhythmic movement, nor frustrated their joyous physical response.”

Stream: Arts Theory and Criticism

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Shauna Steele is a diverse artist working as choreographer, dancer and educator. She has worked with a variety of companies and artists in musicals, theatre and dance and was the founder and artistic director of Parallel Differences youth dance company and has served as the Associate Instructor and Assistant to the Director of the Indiana University African American Dance Company. She choreographed Robert Hay Smith’s, Pollen, The Musical, which premiered in February 2004, and was a guest instructor in “Roots of Jazz” at Western Michigan University. Shauna received her MFA in Performance and Choreography from the University of Michigan with a field focus in Dance History and Art and Technology. Her research interests are focused on Deconstructivist architecture as dance, the progression, absorption, and disbursal of African dance in American dance and culture and collaborative technologies in dance. Her movement aesthetic interests are in Black dance in the Diaspora and German post-modernism. Currently, she is working on producing and directing, Scrye, scheduled to debut in August of 2008. She is co-authoring “Experiencing Dance”, a textbook for dance appreciation to be published by Kendall-Hunt and introduced in Fall 2008. Shauna is an Adjunct Professor of Dance at Grand Valley State University.