Student Performance Work Samples

The following are examples of student works that engage performance and explore relationships between the body, representation, action and power. Here at UWBothell, students can minor in Performance enabling them to then explore and engage diverse performance practices and theories and to develop artistic and conceptual competence in an interdisciplinary context. Professors in the performance curriculum engage performance as both a creative practice and as an analytic lens for actively researching contemporary social issues.

performing healing

jas moultrie

BCULST 582 Performing Community [Bragin] • 2022 • 7:01 min

Drawing from Jaamil Olawole Kosoko’s Séancers, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned, and Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake, this mostly filmed performance calls in my ancestors as i begin healing through dis/ease and loneliness. It is more a document of process and finding my breath, than something finished.

I’m Fine

Alea Kular

BISIA 330 Visualizing & Performing Poetry [Ali] • 2019 • 3:03 min

This piece is dedicated to my childhood friend who struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts. I wrote this poem from the perspective of how she may have been feeling at this time in her life. I decided to embody the emotion of the words through contemporary dance. I want this performance to speak to those who feel like they aren’t good enough and are struggling to find hope. I think that it’s important to show the ones you care about that they are not alone and that it’s okay to not be fine.

Pedicure

Adda Lee

BISIA 319 Interdisciplinary Arts Workshop [Bragin] • 2021 • 1:05 min

Full Artist Statement

Transaction

Megan Eaton

BISIA 383 Performing Diaspora [Ali] • 2021 • 3:47 min

This is… the business world in a woman’s eyes. My intention with this work is to show that yes, the business world has come a long way for women, and yet there will always be obstacles. This beautiful and bright creature is the woman I aspire to be, something of lightness to be able to control my own stable pathways throughout the brutal business operations and life as a whole. I have baggage, as everyone else, but I see this woman using her bondages to persevere through these challenges, as will I.

Untitled (Micro-Performance#6)

Dacia Wagnon

BISIA 383 Performing Diaspora [Ali] • 2021 • 1 min

In response to the micro-performance assignment on space and movement, I had to transform this outdoor setting with my dance. I wanted to use a chair as a prop. Unfortunately, I had to stay at an Airbnb this weekend due to some complications at my apartment. And what do you know, this place only has rolling chairs or flimsy mesh ones. I guess I should’ve brought my own chair. Instead, I present to you a dance, the snow and a bench.

Unbecoming

Directed by Bee Guzman-Elliott/ Edited by Simon Shaw
Choreographed & Danced by Terence Wu
BISMCS 472 A&B Global Media Lab [Sugano/Ali] • 2021 • 3:56 min

Unbecoming is a short dance film about the disorienting experience of escaping conformity. The narrative follows X, one of the last humans with free will who attempts to escape from the clutches of the Dystopian Agents.

Ego Mania (A series of film stills from In Our Own Words)

Katharina Mei-Fa Brinschwitz
BISIA 330 Arts-in-Practice [Ali] & BISMCS 472 Competitive Filmmaking [Sugano] • 2022 • Digital Photography & HD Video

Ego Mania is a portfolio of still images from the film production, In Our Own Words, an absurdist comedy themed around omnipresent societal pressures and their detrimental effect on individuals’ psyches. The film itself was created in Professor Sugano’s BISMCS 472 Competitive Filmmaking course. Featured in these stills are members of The Constituency, an organization that represents the rigidity and hypocrisy of oppressive standards and expectations that leave us feeling isolated and anxious. In Act 1, the Constituents are interviewed about their experience in The Constituency – the twist being that we get to see answers from both their polite, polished, and presentable selves and their inner, angry and ugly alter egos. The intention behind this was to show the contrast between two extremes that each of us has within: The masked caricature that adheres to abusive societal norms and the vulgar unapologetic creature that is birthed due to these internalized external pressures.

Shoulder to Shoulder

By the 2016 BISCLA 380 Contemporary ‘Muslim’ Artists [with Prof Ali] • 2016 • 4:11 min

Our class of 43 students created this response to the trending #MannequinChallenge as our final project. Our class final project was a challenge put forth by our professor to address the ways in which Muslim bodies engage crisis. In class, we discussed how the recent spike in hate crimes and campaign promises about bans and the registration of Muslims continue a post-9/11 fear of “terrorism,” with roots in Orientalist concepts. On December 8, 2016 we stood shoulder-to-shoulder, alongside, other classmates, deans, faculty and staff of the University of Washington Bothell campus to denounce hate and Islamophobia.

BROKEN PROMISES

Bee Guzman-Elliott

BISIA 440 Space, Site, Video [Bodle] and BISIA 330 Arts-in-Practice [Ali] • 2021 • 5:46 min

BROKEN PROMISES is a performance art/spoken word short by Bee Guzman-Elliott who expresses their grief and love as a young person living through the 6th mass extinction in the age of the Anthropocene… when the alarms have been blaring for years now and our somatic-ecology is calling to us louder than ever. It’s a story of slipping love. And a call for transformative action that begins with (re)kindling our ability to feel–our ability to grieve and dive beneath the surface of “climate change” to start healing a deadly addiction to fossil fuels from the inside out. Broken Promises explores an abstracted embodiment of the idea that what we do to the world, we do to ourselves. BROKEN PROMISES was awarded Grand Prize Winner in The Artist Forum 2021 Spoken Word Competition.

The Birth

Edited by Thelma Tunyi
BISMCS 472 A&B Global Media Lab [Sugano/Ali] • 2019 • 1:50 min

Baby? Dinner? Pasta? Afterbirth? Please take it away. This is an absurdist short film created for Global Media Lab’s assignment on “visual motif” in which student teams were assigned an object to work with. The object must be central to the film and must be used to represent something other than itself (metaphor/symbol). Students were additionally encouraged to use movement, gestures and action, not necessarily “acting.” Students are to utilize their own bodies, one another’s skillsets, no dialogue and spend no money in creating the short video assignment.

Another Lonely Winter

Directed by Emi Tsuchimoto / Edited by Madison Galiardi
BISMCS 472 A&B Global Media Lab [Sugano/Ali] • 2021 • 2:02 min

Drawing inspiration from the changing seasons, members of our group embodied elements of each season sometimes using parts of our bodies to create butterflies, grass, birds, the sun, the leaves, clouds, snow, mountains, and flowers. Our editors used layering to create repeated and synchronous movements throughout the film like all the flowers and leaves blooming the same way, and the butterflies turning into the sun rotating in the sky. Color was used strategically to express the tone of each season.

Broken Dreams/Ideas

Abdirahman Omar

BISIA 330 Arts-in-Practice [Ali] • 2020 • 1:27min

Some of the concepts I was exploring were people shooting down your ideas, planting ideas of who you should be on to you. Self-reflecting and choosing your own path. Destroying stereotyping. I choose the song “Mirrors” as my audio because the lines in the song cover the overall theme of the artwork.

American Refugee

By the 2017 BISIA 383 Global Agitation Course [with Prof Ali]Public Performance: December 5, 2017 (8am – 6pm)
Installation was up for 3 days from Dec 4 – Dec 6, 2017.
Video Documentation • 9:38 min

On Dec 5, 2017 students worked as an entire class to conceive and install a public interactive work titled “American Refugee.” This is the documentation video compiled by the class showing the process and final project as experienced by the UWB community of “American Refugee.” Imitating an actual refugee “camp”, we set up tents between UW 1 and Discovery Hall that created an environment that allowed us to block participants off from the “rest of the world”. In this made up situation, North America has been thrown into upheaval and chaos due to several nuclear warheads aimed at Seattle. To read more about the project: https://www.bothell-reporter.com/news/uw-bothells-ali-combines-art-with-social-justice/

I WANT LOVE

Jenny Yoon

BISIA 330 Arts-in-Practice [Ali] • 2021• 4:13 min

I miss my friends. I miss their hugs, I miss their touch, but I miss their love the most. This time of isolation made me realize the truth about myself, that my friends are what make up my ambitions, passion, and personality. I could never enjoy life without them. Exploring this idea of being unable to grasp my sense of self-identity birthed this performance.

Losing Love

Minji Choi

BISIA 383 Performing Diaspora [Ali] • 2021 • 2:30 min

As you can see in the video, I crouched on the floor, relaxed hands, leaned back, hurt, expressed the pain of love, and expressed the process of contraction and expansion, comparing a small sofa in the middle to a strong love and mountain that cannot be overcome. In the relationship between people and people, love breaks and collapses due to the wall, and that part again shows pain through the wall. The main purpose is to express the pain of parting when you lose your loved one.