The intensive sensorial and aesthetically layered experience of Italy’s art cities – where dramatic statuary and enveloping architectonic and urban space constantly invite corporeal self-awareness and self-expression – can be a powerful laboratory for conceptualizing and designing new approaches to dance. It is a type of inspiration that buries itself deep in the artist’s mind, as a kind of somatic memory with long-term rippling effects.
Ashton Titus’s Nel Giardino di Medusa (In the Garden of Medusa) originates from her Florentine experience attending the travel course, The Beauty of Ideas: An Experience of Florence, in January of 2023.
Ashton abandoned herself to a fantasy: being a contemporary dance choreographer living in the Italian Renaissance, and she held this thought in mind while touring the city’s museums, exploring different types of craft, and interviewing local professional dancers. As she noticed the common themes across Renaissance paintings, sculpture, and architecture, she allowed herself to be inspired by them, as a choreographer of the time would have. Among these common threads was a thematic foundation in mythology and a consequential pursuit of stylistic grandeur to elevate art to the domain of legend (coupled with a certain horror vacui in turns leading to decorative mannerism). She explored ways to embed these qualities and themes into an original dance solo. In the Florentine spirit of pushing boundaries and evolving art forms, Ashton chose to make a dance film and experiment with technical elements as well as choreographic ones. By freezing and overlaying certain frames, she was able to create the illusion of statues like those that she saw in the Uffizi Gallery and Galleria dell’Accademia. She also chose to diverge from the mainstream portrayal of Medusa as a fierce warrior-type and instead show her as almost lonely, filling her empty garden with stone companions.
Lead: Ashton Titus (Dance Performance BFA, 2024)