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Christopher McGinnis, a UA fine arts student, worked with dance professor Douglas R. Nielsen on a collaborative project that views art and dance from all perspectives - not just head on.

By La Monica Everett-Haynes, University Communications
August 14, 2008

When Christopher McGinnis, a fine arts student, began sitting in on Douglas R. Nielsen’s dance class to sketch students in motion, it set off an artistic connection.

Over that time he became more “interested in trying to capture emotions in drawings and the way out bodies interact with the space we’re in,” said McGinnis, a second-year University of Arizona master’s degree student in fine arts.

Soon he began working with Nielsen, a dance professor and art collector, in a collaborative project that has culminated with an exhibit and planned performances at the Student Union Memorial Center’s Union Gallery.

The project and exhibit, “Facing Front: Chris McGinnis and the School of Dance,” open Friday and is very much a fusion between the fluidity in McGinnis’ art work, his interest in collaborative projects with various mediums and the multifaceted movement of dance in Nielsen’s world. The exhibit incorporates drawings and paintings with video, documented choreography and live dancing.

“I’m more interested in the actual collaborating and showing people the congruencies between the different ways of expressing art,” said McGinnis, who is studying painting.

“When you can get hands together and different mediums working with different ways of expression – for me, that’s what the show is really about,” he added.

During the two performances, School of Dance students will perform improvisational movements in the gallery, involving the audience members and each other in their dance.

Video projections from a project Nielsen completed earlier will play in the background and one dancer will walk around with a video camera attached to a television strapped to his back that plays the video feed on a delay.

Holly Brown, the Student Union gallery’s curator, said “Facing Front” is somewhat unconventional, that it is “a less formalized approach” to both the dance form and also to exhibitions.

She and Nielsen both emphasized that the work challenges the traditional relationship between the dancer and the viewer.

Nielsen described that it is not common to have interaction between the dancers and the audience. He said “Facing Front” is challenging that by bringing all angles of performance and art into focus.

And that involves redefining both dance and art.

“Audiences are usually told to sit in a chair, shut up and turn the cells phones off,” Nielsen said. “We’re asking them not to sit, but to move throughout the space and experience it in 360 degrees.”

It will be quite a different experience, Brown said.

“We haven’t done this before,” she said.

“It’s inviting people to view in all these different ways. And people are encouraged to bring their own cameras," she said, adding that people are welcome to document their experience. "It’s definitely very modern.”

Modern dance is Nielsen area of expertise.

He has recently been experimenting with new forms and functions within the art of dance, so when he met McGinnis and found that the UA graduate student was very much about capturing energy in his work, Nielsen said he became interested in collaborating with him.

“I was impressed. He was drawing without looking at the paper,” Nielsen said. “He was capturing energy, which is my bag. I’m interested in the blurry line, not the straight line.”