Every year at the University of Colorado Boulder, students in the Master’s Dance program choreograph in “Revel”, the master’s showcase. Rhianna Cranston, a second-year master’s student, choreographed “Remnants” for 13 dancers, collaborating with an onstage cellist and mixing the audio live on stage. The CU Independent’s Addisson Pribble went behind the scenes into Cranston’s creative process.
Listen to the story in this podcast, transcript below.
Pribble: Close your eyes and picture a backyard in the summertime: the clicking of cicadas, a train horn in the distance, kids bickering in the kitchen. These were the sounds of Rhianna Cranston’s childhood growing up in Salina, Kansas—a small industrial town at the edge of the Smoky Hills. Cranston is a second-year master’s student at the University of Colorado Boulder studying dance and expressing herself through choreography. Welcome to the podcast, I’m Addisson Pribble. Cranston created a work called “Remnants” that combined different art mediums, such as audio sound mixing, dance fusion and a live cellist. She spent the summer refining the theme of her dance.
Rhianna Cranston: “When I feel seen, valued, heard, what is, like, being reached in me? And I think a lot of times it’s like speaking to, like, my younger self.”
Pribble: Cranston’s performance included 13 dancers. She asked them to collect audio clips from their youths. During “Revel” at the Charlotte York Irey Theater, on CU Boulder Campus, Cranston sat at the edge of the stage and mixed the sounds from her dancers and from her own childhood, live using her computer and a small sound board. During rehearsal for the piece, dancers shared their clips and stories from their childhoods.
Cranston: “It’s been such a beautiful experience to go through all of those sounds.”
Pribble: Riley Carter, a senior dance and psychology major, is a performer in Cranston’s piece. Carter contributed clips of herself and her three brothers cheering at a basketball game, a video from a beloved dance teacher and a video of her family singing happy birthday to her grandmother.
Riley Carter: “You were able to remind yourself of who you were as a child and kind of figure out where that person is now, may that be still inside you, or somewhere you want to be when you’re going forward.”
Pribble: As an additional element of audio fusion, Cranston chose to have Jae Wes, a cellist, perform on stage with the dancers.
Cranston: “I think when I hear the cello, it just brings out some sort of, like emotion in me that feels very connected to my inner child, and I can’t really put my hand on it. I’ve always, like, I grew up playing instruments. So, I’ve always had some sort of, like, musical understanding, but just the tone and vibrations of the cello is just very rich and tender.”
Pribble: Wes has accompanied other shows where he was given a specific set list to play. During “Remnants,” Wes was told to improvise instead.
Wes: “I feel like the way her dancers are very independent outside of the music makes it easier for me, because it feels like I’m almost following them.”
Pribble: While the cello represented a new sonic space for Cranston to explore, working with another person of color was equally valuable.
Cranston: “Having another black musician collaborative, was just really important to me and to kind of highlight, um the different modalities of creating music outside of, like, what may be standard in this particular demographic of this city.”
Pribble: The process of choreographing this dance was untraditional for Cranston, but vital as she worked to reclaim her favorite dance steps from her childhood like a tap step called the buffalo. When Nov. 4 came and the group ran out of rehearsal time, Cranston, knowing that she would continue to experiment with the ideas that fueled “Remnants”, didn’t feel pressured to find the perfect ending.
Cranston: “The beautiful part about live mixing is that we can just control the closure ourselves, Jae and I. So, we’re like, “All right, this we’re just going to fade it out here, and this is rendition one.”
Pribble: Cranston’s work is one of six in “Revel” the Theater and Dance Department’s Master’s showcase which took place Nov. 14 and 15. Thanks for listening, I’m Addisson Pribble.
Contact CU Independent Assistant Arts Editor Addisson Pribble at Addisson.Pribble@colorado.edu.
