Alone, Together: How Student Artists are Transcending Physical Limitations to Create
by Alexandra Fiorentino-Swinton
Though the current public health situation has scattered UChicago students around the globe, many RSOs (Registered Student Organizations) have carried on remotely. UChicago has a vast range of artistic student activities and the dedicated members of these organizations have found innovative ways to do what they love despite necessary physical limitations. Dancers, singers, and creatives of all creeds have utilized technology to stay connected with their peers and create collaborative art.
UChicago Arts spoke to a few students about the remote artistic endeavors they’ve taken part in.
Ex Crew
Kristina Kim is a second-year in the College and a member of Ex Crew, a dance collective on campus known for their boundless energy and creativity. Ex frequently performs at various dance and cultural showcases on campus, as well as collegiate and national forums like World of Dance. She is also the publicity director and a video editor for their workshops, newly crucial tasks as sharing information across social media has become the primary means of organizational communication. Ex has stayed extremely active over the spring quarter, holding weekly trainings, workshops, and team bonding activities.
What has the experience been like, creating collaborative art while socially isolated?
Personally, I miss sharing a physical space with everybody and seeing movements three dimensionally. It can be kind of sad when one person is teaching choreo and everyone else is quiet because they're muted [over video chat]. It's not the same kind of energy. But besides that, it's still been fun. One of our bonding activities was our “family choreo showcase” during 6th week, which was especially exciting to both plan and watch. Last quarter, we made three families within the team (with two Ex board members per family) and so we had each family pick a song, make choreography, and put together a video. We watched the videos over Zoom and it turned out very cool! Everyone got to be highlighted, which doesn't always happen in our sets when we have many people on stage. Hopefully we'll get to post those soon.
What otherwise unavailable opportunities have you been able to utilize given the current stay-at-home situation?
Usually we're focused on creating a set for a competition or performance, with only around five choreographers making choreo for that quarter, so we don't have the time to work on building foundations or trying out new skills. We're now giving more dancers the opportunity to create their own choreo and for everyone to see their individual styles. Our dancers have taken initiative to create and share their own art, including making choreo for weekly challenges, being a workshop or conditioning leader, and choreoing for the family projects. And since everything is online, we thought it'd be a great chance to get teachers from other parts of the country to diversify the choreography and dance styles we're exposed to. It’s given us a little taste of the dance community on a national level. We also reached out to [fellow UChicago dance group] Groove Theory because their dancers tend to specialize in specific styles, so they can bring their own expertise. For conditioning and workshops, we set up a sign up sheet for anyone in the crew. We wanted to give more dancers a chance to lead the team, and also come up with their own choreo.
Voices In Your Head
Fourth-year Lauren Torian is the music director for campus a cappella group Voices In Your Head—regular competitors at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA), arranging and performing their own compositions of music across an expansive range of genres. They’ve collaborated remotely with students across multiple universities to create The Remedy Project:
Could you describe the idea behind The Remedy Project and the process of how it came to be?
“Remedy” is a song that we like to sing with visiting groups. If we invite a group for a joint concert, we’ll send them the sheet music and be able to sing one last song all together. This year we were competing in the ICCA along with about 450 other groups, and we were devastated when the remaining events were canceled. We thought that it might be nice for everyone who competed to have the chance to sing together one last time and make themselves heard without needing to be in the same place.
Only days before the Illinois quarantine measures went into effect, we made a video calling to everyone whose ICCA or ICHSA journey had been affected by COVID-19, asking for submissions. At first, it was certainly, well, isolating. To me, nothing’s weirder than recording my own solo voice with no context, but once we layered everyone together, it became apparent just how massive this project was. I was not prepared for how emotional I would feel listening to the depth of sound we were able to achieve! We worked with an alumnus to compile everyone’s recordings into an amazing video and (newly-released) single that connects more than 160 people across 3000 miles.
What is the best thing about producing art under these circumstances?
When you’re creating a digital art piece, the work never really stops, but neither do the ideas. Our group chat was always bumping with someone else’s cool idea for the video or an edit to the vocals, and one of the main issues we had was just making sure that everyone had read the conversations before we made a decision. We put a lot of extra effort into communication just to make sure that the project was as successful as possible. Of course, I love seeing my friends every week over Zoom, but I love that they are honing their individual crafts as well! So many of the people in Voices have made their own music Instagrams and are actively composing their own music alongside the work that we did together. It makes me happy to see people passionate about their art!
“I want everyone to remember: whether it’s music, Netflix, video games, Or podcasts, at our darkest moments we all turn to forms of art, so it’s time we give a bit more respect to artists around the world!”
Listen to Voices’ “Remedy” on any of these platforms:
Radio[24]
Art has been a powerful tool for students of all levels of experience and involvement, including first-year Gabi Garcia. She participated in Radio[24], a virtual modification of UChicago theatre staple Theater[24]. Theater[24] is an event in which an entire festival of plays is constructed and performed in 24 hours—writers work from 8pm-8am to create each play, then the cast and crew work from 8am-8pm to bring them to life. Radio[24] transformed it into a radio play festival, and took full advantage of the added benefits that come with integrating technology with art, adding in roles such as composer, graphic designer, and sound designer.
What was the experience like, creating collaborative art while socially isolated?
I found it very refreshing. There’s no denying that collaboration is hard, even in person, but being socially isolated has made me value any sort of human interaction I can access. Plus, I got to write with a good friend of mine who lives halfway across the country from me, which was a rare treat since time zones tend to make talking to friends outside of class more difficult. I also found it to be somewhat rejuvenating. I’ve discovered at UChicago that I’m more of an extrovert than I thought, and being ripped away from a situation where I was constantly around people to one where I’m not had been taking its toll. It’s a reminder that, of everything that exists on this Earth right now, art is that string that ties us all together. Theatre and visual art and dance and music and all forms of art are essential in a manner parallel to STEM/business/etc., to paraphrase Dead Poets Society. Producing art—writing in particular—brings back the hope and open-eyed wonder I began looking at the world with when I went to college. I’m just hoping that I can keep it until we’re back!
Are there any particular moments that stuck out with you in terms of Radio[24] recreating the sense of community that the current isolation situation has taken away?
I didn’t realize how much Zoom could emulate the Theater[24] process. I wrote for Theater[24] fall quarter, and a significant amount of the process was essentially going off to work with your specific team, then rejoining the large group of everyone participating. Being able to see so many faces on one call reminded me that though I may be physically alone, there are so many people going through the same struggles I am, and they are just as excited as I am to have an opportunity for creativity that can build a community similar to the one we lost. I hope Radio[24] continues existing as its own event! It was fun to learn to write for another format (I, primarily, am a stage playwright) and collaborate digitally. All of the pieces that were created were incredibly well-executed, and the format allows for more permanent preservation of the work than traditional Theater[24].
Watch Radio[24] below, and check out Gabi’s piece on her experience in the Chicago Maroon.
MODA
Andrew Chang, third-year and MODA Blog Editor-In-Chief, has continued to run the online branch of UChicago’s fashion publication this quarter. This past fall, he instituted a series of editorials called MODA Lookbooks, which are all student styled, modelled, and produced. Episode 6 of the lookbooks was conducted virtually and is cheekily entitled “A Zoom Of Your Own.”
Could you describe the idea behind this lookbook?
I think when we got news of the quarantine, a lot of us at MODA Blog began to feel discouraged or nervous that there would be a limit on the type of content we could publish, given that we didn’t have the privilege of seeing each other, putting on each other’s makeup, working in a confined space, etc. And I think for our remote lookbooks, I wanted to show my team that there would be a way to still produce really dynamic, graphic, cool images that are interesting and that start conversations perhaps because of the circumstances they were taken under, but also regardless of those circumstances.
Leading up to the quarantine, a lot of our shoots experimented with really intensive post production: things like collaging ripped up shreds of photos from our shoots to layering transparent photos on top of each other to hyper saturating colors to create something visually stimulating, and I think my team and our audience started to notice that experimental spirit as part of our art-making process.
A friend of mine, while we were on a video call no less, suggested conducting a shoot through screenshots of Zoom calls, which in all honesty seemed like a joke at the beginning. But idea kept resurfacing when I’d call other friends or attend class over Zoom. I kept thinking about Zoom, or more broadly video calling, as our mode of connection and, in a lot of ways, our mode of escaping our quarantines. I kept thinking about how our digital landscape is a site for this almost romantic escape. Somewhere along this deep think, a blogger published an article on Y2K style, followed by another on a photographer named Alessio Albi, who shoots through FaceTime. I think mixing all those ideas together, I was inspired to take what my team was engaging with and make something out of it. Even before the quarantine, I noticed that so many people on my team had multiple skills. We had photographer-stylists or stylist-makeup artists or model-bloggers and when quarantine hit, I knew I wanted to highlight the multitalented members of my team. Given all those ideas, I drafted up a pitch and sent it into my team, under the horrifying name: "Y2K-apocalyptic-Zoom-AliceInWonderland-digital-fantasy(3)”, but thankfully, the pitch was well received.
“It’s almost as if the quarantine allowed my team of creators to have more individuality in these group projects, and I think that individual spirit is something I want to take with me and incorporate more of when the quarantine ends.”
Check out the entire lookbook here.
What is the best thing about producing art under these circumstances?
The community. I think something I didn’t expect when I first started doing shoots was for there to be such a positive reception from the team that actually puts the shoots together. These projects were originally conceived as product-driven; I only really imagined what the final product might look like at the start. After working on so many shoots, I realize that they’re much more process-driven. They’re all about the lead up, what people bring to the shoot, what ideas they want to explore, what messages begin to form through actually conducting the shoot. I think I can only bring so much to a shoot, and a lot of these projects become the sum of everyone else’s ideas as well. This whole lookbook was organized through Facebook, with volunteers from my team (myself included) bravely offering themselves as self-stylist-makeup-artist-model-photographers. I was amazed by how up for the shoot everyone was, even as I felt a bit of trepidation moving into unsteady waters.
Producing art as a team creates a final product that could never be imagined or predicted, and I’m always so amazed when I see those first images appearing in our drives. It’s seeing how someone imagined, and often reimagined, the initial concept of the shoot, and I think that surprise is something that I love about creating content for the blog. In a lot of ways, it’s representative of how I see fashion—it’s not really about one idea or one interpretation, it’s about everyone sharing their vision and that collective sharing produces something magical.
These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity. Featured image via MODA Blog.