Adagio for Strings: A Dance Piece

The objective of this project was to conceptualize a modern dance piece set to Samuel Barber’s string quartet piece Adagio for Strings. The piece is deeply melancholic, full of passion, and highly regarded as being able to move anyone to tears.

Heavily influenced by the way the music ebbs and flows like water, and the waves of emotion the audience experiences while listening to the piece, the concept I developed was a tragic love story between an astronaut visiting a faraway aquatic-based planet and an alien from said planet. The romantic pair are the focal point of the piece with stilt walkers playing the role of trees in the background and dancers in the foreground playing the role of flowers framing out the world of this foreign planet.

Fashion designers such as Iris Van Herpen, Hanna Touma, and Lisa Jiang were my primary inspirations for this piece’s design because of the designers’ use of organic shapes and the sophisticated way they play with color. The color palette I chose lives primarily in cool tones and the flowy/sheer fabrics of the planet flora and fauna (i.e. silk, batiste, chiffon, and organza) create a juxtaposition against the astronaut who’s dressed in metallic tones and stiff fabrics.

Concept Statement