Creative Process

“I am spending the month diving into creative composition, site-sensitive work, drawing, writing poetry, and thinking about experiential learning for students and the role of the arts in society and culture. I am in Chambersburg, PA at Wilson College surrounded by the beautiful Great Appalachian Valley. This is my summer residency for the Interdisciplinary MFA in choreography and creative writing I am pursuing. Last year, when I began, we were fully online so it has been a true gift this summer to be in person with an amazing group of artists dedicated to deepening their artistic practices. In my interdisciplinary work last week, I was intrigued by a discussion on Erasure Poetry. Poet Matt McBride continues to expand my understanding of what poetry and creative writing could be, how it is created and the vastly infinite ways language can be shared. Erasure poetry, also known as blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating wholly new work from what remains. I began by picking a random book from the library slated to be destroyed. I worked with a non-fiction book on the Green Economy and happened upon a page discussing entrepreneurship in women in 3rd world countries. I knew that I wanted to create something in the theme of my next dance work: exploring bicultural identity and its intersection with feminism. At first, I was calculated in choosing the words I wanted to stay visible, but found it to be overbearing, and constricting. Halfway through the process, l released the preciousness of the outcome and went with instinctive choices and ‘erased’ words that did not feel connected to my theme, and made visible words that I felt represented a connection to what I am exploring in my dance work. I was surprised by the outcome, and to see such a clear connection come about from an almost random process.” – Regina