First Name:
Ashley
Last Name:
Willingham
Major Department:
Communication Studies/Dance
Thesis Director:
Susan Lutz
Date of Thesis:
May 2009
Writing about dance is like dreaming about living for it offers a glimpse of what it is like, but it cannot encompass the actuality. In fact, this is not a quandary specific to dance it spans across all like experiences. Dance cannot articulate the symbolism within words, as a picture cannot convey a texture, any more than a taste can be captured through the keys of a piano. In fact, the majority of today has been spent typing and deleting, typing and deleting, for I seem to be at a loss as to how to put words to my choreographic endeavor this semester, my Capstone piece. For my senior thesis, I researched through choreography the effects of medium on message. Approaching the end of my four years of undergraduate studies I sought to understand how my two majors correlated. The relationship I discovered between my B.A. in Dance Studies and my B.S. in Journalism is that dance and journalism, the studies of movement and text are mediums used to convey messages. My research came together as a dance pieces titled Conveying the Wordless, which was performed April 28, 2009 in Valborg Theater at Appalachian State University.