What the Body Knows
"Sonder" is the title the graduating seniors of UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance chose for their May showcase. The word originates from John Koenig's crowdsourced "Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows" and describes that melancholic and marvelous realization that every human is walking through the world bearing unseen and unknowable complexities, main characters only in our own stories. For this, Erin Co and Maia Driz-Diaz each presented a piece that explored new territories in their art practice.
Driz-Diaz grew up in Pasadena and came to UCLA as a psychology major, after dancing from a young age, inspired by an early experience watching "The Nutcracker" on stage in New York City.
She joined the dance department in her second year, and eventually built an ambitious academic program that stretched across three disciplines — dance, psychology and disability studies.
Her senior work, "After, Another Atmosphere," is the culmination of a yearlong conceptual project that began with a cold email.
Driz-Diaz had been following New York-based choreographer Akira Uchida on social media for years, admiring his work. She reached out asking permission to use his piece "After It Was Warm" as a source. He responded. They got on Zoom and talked about her vision to start with an existing audio description of his work, created for blind and visually impaired audiences. Driz-Diaz used that audio description as a starting point.
She was inspired to create the piece based on courses from the disability studies minor, in which she learned more about audio descriptions, she said.
"I thought it would be so interesting see how language can inform movement, and how movement can inform language," she said.
Nine dancers respond to a sound score layered with ambient music and Driz-Diaz's voice, the result of a very exploratory process, Driz-Diaz said. The choreography took the form of improvisational workshopping, building responses to the audio prompt with dancers she has become close to over the years, a process that gave her a newfound love for the art form, she said.
The project also serves as her capstone for the disability studies minor, a field she entered partly through her mother, a special education teacher whose students she loved. She's harnessed that instinct toward advocacy at Rollettes, an L.A.-based wheelchair dance team that empowers women with disabilities through performance. As the organization's intern, Driz-Diaz runs the Boundless Talent Showcase — an open-category dance and performance competition held during the group's flagship annual convention.
After a gap year, she plans to pursue a graduate degree in dance movement therapy, merging her experience in the arts and sciences.
Erin Co grew up in the Bay Area training in contemporary ballet, jazz and modern, and spent her teen years in the intensive programs at Alonzo King LINES Ballet in San Francisco. The School of the Arts and Architecture program's ethos — improvisational, self-directed, resistant to codification — gave her room to rediscover what she loved. She is also completing a BS in biology, and like Driz-Diaz believes art and science fuel each other.
For her senior capstone, "Between Other Explorers," she took up a challenge. The piece incorporates a filament-like web fabric that encases her body — engulfing, concealing, restricting. For this, Co said she drew from the Filipino concept of hiya, feelings of inadequacy or rejection. The deceptively fluid fabric intended as a physical manifestation of shame, Co moves through resistance toward surrender, yielding to a burden without fully shedding it.
"I'm always interested in the kinesthetic response to what's around me," Co said. "I was really drawn to the aspect of the material posing limitations on my body and how I navigate that in real time."
Co said the opportunity to step outside the bounds of a traditional piece and serve as her own creative director opened her thinking about more choreographic pursuits as she moves ahead in her career.
After graduation, Co is heading to Europe. She will train with the RUBBERBAND dance company in Canada, then spend two weeks at the B12 Festival in Berlin working with choreographer Roni Chadash. She is also hoping to eventually train with NOD (Nuova Officina della Danza), a contemporary dance program in Italy, she said.
"I really am inspired by the contemporary dance scene in Europe, and what they do," she said. "It's so visceral."
