Environment As Impulse: Dance Improvisation in the Rainforest
The Center for Integrative Studies and the Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts are pleased to announce that Sherry Saterstrom (Dance) and Allison Lorenzen ('04) are the first winners of the Magnus the Good Award-an endowed award intended "to encourage undergraduate research in student-faculty collaborations, and to stimulate and encourage the intellectual curiosity of St. Olaf students and faculty." Besides the winning proposal, the selection committee received other excellent proposals from faculty and students in the natural sciences, the social and applied sciences, the fine arts, and the humanities, that testify to the creativity and excellence of collaborations between students and faculty across the campus.
Saterstrom and Lorenzen's project, "Environment As Impulse: Dance Improvisation in the Rainforest," continues their work in collaborative dance and extends this collaboration to La Suerte Biological Station in the rainforest in Costa Rica. In bestowing the award, the selection committee acknowledged Saterstrom and Lorenzen's commitment to building a relationship with La Suerte, their commitment to exploring the environment through art, and their innovative use of improvisation as a way of learning.
"One of the ongoing challenges of working artistically in improvisation is stimulating a freshness of approach. The best improvisation often is sparked by the unfamiliar, the unexpected. By locating ourselves in an environment which is completely foreign to both of us, by moving outside our familiar boundaries, we hope to discover patterns and assumptions that have become a part of our improvisational process which may be worth questioning and challenging. We also imagine that the realities of this particular place with its unfamiliar landscape, language, culture, and rhythm can open us to new possibilities within dance/ movement improvisation which we have not discovered. One of the tantalizing features of dance improvisation for us is the unpredictability of the entire process. One can have a large palette of movement skills, a high level of awareness skills, and still can be endlessly surprised by the way things generate, develop, and integrate. This process is pushed to the extreme when the environment itself is one which is providing input, creating challenges, posing problems."
