Anna Gayley’s Thesis Production: Geometric Movement
What is your thesis about, generally?
Gayley’s thesis culminated in a dance production titled Geometric Movement (under the advisorship of Victoria Fortuna and Angélica Osorno). In it, a quartet of contemporary dancers engaged playfully with the rotations and symmetries of a cube. The piece was performed on February 13 and February 14, alongside At the Barre, a dance thesis by Catie Bryant on the ballet experience, to great public reception. The “Geo” part of the title comes from geometry and group theory, which are explored via the also titular “metric movement.”
As a math major who does love to dance on occasion, I was thrilled to see a crossover between these two very disconnected words. Gayley wrote on the playbill that, “I hope that anyone with a background or knowledge in dance, math, both, or neither is able to leave this show with a new understanding or curiosity of either discipline.”
In the piece, four white-clothed dancers smoothly interact with a 6’x6’x6’ PVC pipe cube, as well as a smaller handheld cube, all set to the ethereal music of Frank Schültge and Nils Frahm. Actions are translated from dancer to dancer down a line, or reflected across the invisible wall of the cube, or rotated around as if the cube was a strange carousel. Making smooth, cross-body gestures, a dancer highlights the axes of rotation of the cube before two others physically pick it up and spin it around the fourth dancer, still inside. The symmetry maintained by the dancers plays a key role in the choreography, exploring the math represented by the cube. These transformations, reflections, and rotations were transcribed by the dancers in matrix form on a whiteboard, another way of solidifying the mathematical connections.
On an emotional level, I also appreciated that all of the dancers approached the somewhat alien objects with curiosity, slight awe, and even trepidation. This was very much the experience I had in Abstract Algebra, where we learned about the symmetries of a cube highlighted in this performance.
In an interview, Gayley explained how the production draws inspiration from a piece called Locus by Trisha Brown, who taught at Reed in 1975 and helped to establish the modern Dance Department. In the piece, Brown constructed a rubik-esque cube around her, assigned each point in the grid a letter, and played with dancing around the space while trying to spell out premade sentences. Gayley mentioned that current Reed dance professor Minh Tran performed in Locus when it was first in production, and was a very helpful resource.
The other main source of inspiration for the performance was the work of Rudolf von Laban, who invented a way to articulate dance called “Laban Movement Analysis,” involving the platonic solids to represent stability, motion, rotations, and the center of movement.
What got you inspired in this?
Gayley grew up dancing but stopped because of Covid. She then took up cheerleading in high school. At Reed, she started out as a traditional math major (who happened to have taken a lot of dance classes), until people started asking about her qual and thesis. At that point, she knew that theoretical math research “was not always the biggest interest for me,” and instead decided to follow her experience working in education, particularly towards non-traditional methods of learning for special needs students. Gayley had a very productive conversation with her academic advisor Marcus Robinson and dance professor Oluyinka Parsons-Akinjiola. They reminded her that Reed is all about “finding the academics that fit with you.” She then looked into the option of an ad hoc interdisciplinary major (in which you build your own major requirements between two departments and write a crossover thesis), and found that it fit her needs perfectly.
What has the process been like for you?
Gayley admitted that “I’ve really enjoyed the process” of working in a largely unexplored field. In particular, she loved having two advisors (Victoria Fortuna for dance and Angélica Osorno for math) who are supportive of her ideas. She said it’s “honestly the best combo ever.”
The biggest challenge she encountered was exactly the first thought I had when I heard of the project: “can those disciplines actually work together?” Gayley commented on the “social challenges” of trying to defend such an unconventional ad hoc combination, but did say that many people within both fields have been supportive.
Gayley described watching numerous archival videos of old performances and listening to a lot of improvised scores from Trisha Brown in preparation for putting the performance together. The large cube prop was built in the Theater Department (shoutout to Liam Kaas-Lentz). The smaller cube was 3D printed with the help of Jay Ewing of the physics machine shop. Gayley noted that in the previous semester she had been in a theater thesis production, which “really helped me prepare for this in terms of timelines, what questions to ask of people” and more. She liked putting on a production for her thesis, as it left her with “another physical thing as an output of the process,” rather than just a thick manuscript.
What do you hope this accomplishes?
There were a number of aspirations behind this discipline-bridging project. As they had discussed in her dance J-Sem, Gayley hoped to normalize seeing dance and movement as a valid way of doing research and exploring the world.
Gayley also hopes it can be an example for people who enjoy being in both the STEM and creative worlds. She said “even though it is very difficult” to be in both at the same time, you don’t always have to pick one or the other. Of the performance, she said, “I would hope that it’s some type of bridge between math and dance spaces.” She noted that the cast demonstrates a wide array of STEM vs. creative backgrounds. The three non-math majors in the production said that they’ve gained a deeper understanding of the mathematics behind the performance.
On that point, Gayley also tied the project back to her future goals. She said, “if I were to continue doing this research, I would want to focus more on education for people who struggle learning in a traditional classroom.”
Any advice for thesising, or soon to be thesising students?
Gayley recommended that, for a dance thesis, or really for any creative thesis, “the biggest thing is to keep writing the thoughts [and] feelings you’re having” once a day, every day. She said it will prove helpful in the end when it’s time to reflect on the process. Additionally, it’s very important to find something that feels personally interesting to you so the thesis feels a lot less like work and a lot more like an opportunity.
What was the wackiest thing you learned about while researching?
Gayley was continually taken aback by how small the dance and math worlds are and how many crossovers there are within, but not between, these two worlds.