The Meaning of Dance
Digital Collage
Course: ARTDES 130 - Methods of Inquiry
Instructor: Mark Epstein
Interviewee/Model: YC
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Project Duration: JAN 2022
Keywords: Digital Collage, Graphic Design, Photography, Interview
Overview
This collection of four digital collages emerged from a series of unstructured and structured interviews with my friend YC. Centered around the theme "The Meaning of Dance," these collages combine photographs of YC with various elements, strategically chosen to symbolize the four keywords derived from the interviews.
Unstructured Interview
The purpose of this unstructured interview is to learn about the interviewee as much as possible. I started with the question "tell me about yourself", which led to the conversation in the next 20 minutes. The following mindmap was generated after the interview.
Structured Interview
During the unstructured interview, the interviewee spent a great amount of time talking about her life as a dancer. Thus I decided to focus on her dancing experience for the structured interview and developed the following questions:
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What did you learn from dancing?
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How do you think the meaning of dancing has changed for you from the point you just started?
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If your mom didn’t push you at the moment, do you think you will continue dancing in general?
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Why do you think your mom will have such a high expectation on you?
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Do you think there is another interest or skill you might developed if you didn’t go into dance?
The Meaning of Dance
Reviewing my notes from the structured interview, I found an overall theme under the topic is "What does dancing mean to you (the interviewee)?". She has danced for so many years and has formed all kinds of relationships with dancing as a subject and with people around, so I believe it will be fun to showcase all those intersections. I also decided to apply hands throughout the designs since posture is very important to the dance genre the interviewee does.
Lifestyle. As the interviewee suggested in the question “How do you think the meaning of dancing has changed from the point you just started”, dancing now has become a lifestyle for her. She can still live without it, but it is indeed important for her, just like Oreo (her favorite snack). The hand at the bottom symbolizes the manipulations from her mother, as she was forced to learn dancing by her mother initially before it developed into a lifestyle.
Resistance. The interviewee believes that it is the spirit of dancing. The hands pushing one another symbolize how the teacher has pushed the interviewee to improve her flexibility in daily practice, while the Tai Chi symbol in the middle implies that the resistant forces in between their bodies are finding a balance point in the meantime. The ink-style ribbons in the background also represent that one can also be resistant in a gentle way.
Independence. It refers to the interviewee’s experiences of attending dancing camps abroad at a very young age. The bird represents the explorations she has done as a small kid, and the tree in the back symbolizes that the bird is leaving the nest. The background is done in an “innovated Chinese style (Guo Chao)”, which emerged in recent years and was largely applied in performance costumes for dancers.
Diligent. It took a lot of time and effort for the interviewee to reach the skills she owns right now. In a basic gesture for Chinese folk dance, the hands form the shape of a clock (hour and minute hand). Together with the interviewee dancing in the foreground, it symbolizes that a minute on the stage takes ten years of practice: time is required to succeed on stage.
