My Experience with One Hour Study

The Dance Department at The Ohio State University requires each freshman dance major to take the Freshman Seminar Class. In this class we learn mostly about the department itself, and how the university works in general. At the end of the second semester, each freshman is expected to complete a one hour research study. We had to type and submit a project proposal, get that approved, execute the study in one hour, collect data, and present everything at the Freshman Research Forum. At the very beginning of this process I was overwhelmed with all of the information we were given. I did not think I would be able to figure out and execute a study that was genuinely worth something. However, after thinking, planning, and rethinking again, I came up with what I was going to do for my One Hour Study. I got the idea from my first ever college composition class. For the first couple of weeks we spent a lot of time on a specific compositional tool. This tool is called a Room Read. A Room Read is where you look around in the room your in, make a list of items in that room and generate choreography based off of those items. At the end of this exercise, you should have a phrase to work with. This is a device that is typically used in Modern and concert dance. Since I came from a competition dance background, this was something totally new to me. I struggled with it a lot, but I eventually got the hang of it. I watched my classmates all have different experiences with the Room Read. Some of them came from a modern dance background, so it was more natural to them. Some came from a competition dance background, so they struggled with it similarly like myself. This gave me the idea research how your dance background influences the way you make choreography and what kind of choreography you make. In order to observe this idea, I recruited three dancers, Joshua Pryor, Meledi Montano, and Lauren Egle. Joshua had no formal training whatsoever. Meledi came from a modern dance and improvisational dance background. Lauren had eighteen plus years of competition studio training. So in one hour, I invited all three dancers separately into a studio, gave them a list of ten items from the room to generate material from. The words were: speaker, ballet barre, mirror, piano keys, lightbulb, chair, broom, first aid kit, laptop, and headphones. Once the dancers had generated the phrase and had it memorized I took a video of them doing it. I then interviewed them on camera and asked them the following questions. "What kind of dance experience did you have before coming to The Ohio State University?" "Take us through the process you went through in order to complete the Room Read." "Did you like doing the Room Read?" "How do you normally choreograph a piece?" "Will you use the Room Ream in the future?" After each of the dancers completed the Room Read and went through the interview, I had collected a lot of data, and I was able to draw a few conclusions from it, but first I am going to talk about what I thought was going to happen as a result of this study, my hypothesis. I hypothesized that only Meledi would say that she enjoyed the Room Read and use it in the future to choreograph, while both Joshua and Lauren would say they did not enjoy the Room Read device and would not use it in the future to choreograph. Parts of my hypothesis came true, and other parts of it did not. The first dancer to complete my study was Joshua. Joshua's interview responses surprised me. He actually enjoyed doing the Room Read and stated that he would in fact use it to choreograph in the future. Meledi as I hypothesized was really comfortable with the Room Read and said that she could see herself using it again in the future to choreograph. Lauren as I hypothesized as well was not totally comfortable with the Room Read. In her interview she described her process as taking too long and that she spent too much time on trying to create the perfect move for each Room Read item. She then sounded very unsure when asked if she would use the Room Read device in the future. She said that she "might" use it which is what I expected from her. Overall I really enjoyed this process and I felt that it has really prepared to do more extensive research. It was really interesting to see all of the results since I personally came from one of the backgrounds I researched. Below I have attached a video of all of my data including both Room Read phrases and interview questions.