Computer Science and Dance are choice driven disciplines. The output of their processes are compositions of experience. Dancers are not computers and computers are not people but there are comparable traces of humanity in the way each interpret and interact with their respective inputs, outputs, and environments. These overlaps are perhaps not obvious, but in an increasingly specialized world it is important to discuss them. Dynamic Programming and improvisational movement exist within exclusive corners of their respective fields and are characterized by their inherent adaption to change. Inspired by the work of Ivar Hagendoorn, John Cage and other interdisciplinary artists, complexMovement is motivated by the need to create space for intersections between these two powerful groups and find overlaps in the questions they ask to achieve their goals. Dance and Computer Science are just one example of hidden partnerships between their respective fields. Their respective sides allow for ample side by side comparisons but for the purpose of this work, we will focus upon two smaller sectors of their studies: improvisational movement and the design of Dynamic Programming algorithms.

This study focuses on identifying which knee injuries commonly afflict the Arizona State University students who dance contemporary ballet. The study investigates why and how these injuries occur through survey data and in-depth physical and written assessments with a test pool of five dancers. The study discovered three themes that emerged from the data: a lack of posterior chain engagement, lack of lateral support in the knees, and weight sinking into the knees and ankles. All of theses themes relate back to a lack of use of functional rotation, and its key relationship in supporting contemporary ballet movement. Though current and past studies address some of these issues, the goal of this study was to create a more holistic solution to these issues by including multiple perspectives: kinesiology, somatics, and an understanding that each individual has a unique anatomy with which the individual needs to adapt. As a result, a more holistic training program including these perspectives was created as a result of this study.

With this document I will discuss and reflect upon the performance and art exhibition show which I presented as part of my MFA thesis at the MonOrchid Gallery in Phoenix, Arizona on February 10, 2017. The approach to my thesis comes from my perspective as a Hip Hop practitioner exploring the relationship between each artistic discipline that makes up Hip Hop. Through this lens I will show the knowledge that is built from both individual and the conventional collective understandings of Hip Hop. As a practitioner for over 20 years, Hip Hop has molded my mind to be multifaceted, giving me a strong interest in art making as a collaborative process. I believe the more you see the relationship between each medium, the more that connection manifests a larger cognizance for where these art forms can progress. The relationship between all of the mediums involved creates a rhythm; it is the understanding of rhythm that can connect all types of art. When you are able to understand the process of rhythm as a through line, you will be able to create from your own personal rhythmic qualities in all things. This paper will delve into how my thesis performance incorporated not only music production and dance, but the written form of Hip Hop culture (Writing), identity, and the fundamentals of design. I will use the discussion of these forms to explore the similarities of meaning in movement-making behind B-boying, the most fundamental aspect of visual art and in body forms within Hip Hop. My aim was to research what we (the dancers and myself) learned from the movement in conjunction with Writing. I will discuss how many ways this can be beneficial to exploring new interdisciplinary creative collaborations with 
design, visual art, choreography, sculpture, and architecture. Rhythm is the connective tissue between these disciplines in Hip Hop culture.

ABSTRACT

Connection, isolation, and female empowerment are not often explored nor analyzed together, yet often coexist harmoniously. Through processes of improvisation and dance making informed by feminist perspectives, the research investigated the intersections of empowerment, voice, knowledge construction and embodiment. It focused on women's ways of understanding their embodiment, the relationship between choice-making and meaning-making, processes of reflecting upon lived experiences, and exploring how experiences are expressed through the body and body attitudes. The research study explored and analyzed not only my own meaning making about connection, isolation, and female empowerment, but also the perspectives of fourteen young women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three. Using the themes of connection, isolation, and female empowerment as fuel for creative expression and movement development, my dancers and I collaborated on making an evening length work that reflected our findings based on connection, isolation, and female empowerment and as well as embodied values.

This document analyzes the use of the Principles of Design within the applied project It’s My Party, a multimedia dance theatre production, as a means to address and overcome the stigmatization of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Through the orchestration of dance, music, props, acting, video, and spoken word, this interdisciplinary work investigates how these production elements synthesize into a transformative theatrical experience for audiences. Outlined in this document is the eight month design process. The process included concept design, assessing, processing, customizing the message, script development, rehearsals, and video production, and concluded with an evening length production. Analyzed through the structural narrative of The Hero’s Journey, this autobiographic work details the author’s HIV-positive (HIV+) coming out story from a restorative narrative perspective. By addressing the subject of HIV from a contemporary point-of-view, this project strives to reencode the troubling associations affiliated with HIV with an empowered and hopeful understanding.

This project explores the cultivation of artistic methodologies centered in embodied movement practices. I worked in collaboration with dancers to inform the development of a movement vocabulary that is authentic to the individual as well as to the content of the work. Through the interplay between movement and subconscious response to elements such as writing, imagery, and physical environments I created authentic kinesthetic experiences for both dancer and audience. I submerged dancers into a constructed environment by creating authentic mental and physical experiences that supported the development of embodied movement. This was the impetus to develop the evening length work, Flesh Narratives, which consisted of five vignettes, each containing its own distinctive creative process driven by the content of each section. This project was presented January 29- 31, 2016 in the Fine Arts Center room 122, an informal theatre space, that supplemented an immersive experience in an intimate environment for forty viewers. This project explored themes of transformation including cycles, concepts of life, death and reincarnation, and enlightenment. Through the art of storytelling, the crafting of embodied movers, and the theory of Hauntology, the viewer was taken on a journey of struggle, loss, and rebirth.

Waiting for a Passenger / Ship to Go to Sea is a performance made by In Kyung Lee and performed by five dancers. It premiered in Americas Gallery at ASU Art Museum on January 20, January 24, and Jan 27, 2015. The work existed in a container of geometric spatial structure and cyclical rhythmic cycles, which were filled with repetition, accumulation, and minimalistic durational movement vocabulary. The dancers courageously ventured through the rigorous and exacting structure, transforming individual and collective struggles and vulnerabilities into the beauty of being human. This document looks into the background and creation process of the work.

Transformation Is... is an arts practice-led research in Dance and Design, embodying and materializing concepts of structure, leadership and agency and their role in bringing about desired social transformation. My personal experiences as a foreign student interested in transformative experiences gave origin to this arts practice-led research. An auto-ethnographic approach informed by grounded theory methods shaped this creative inquiry in which dance was looked at as data and rehearsals became research fields. Within the context of social choreography, a transformational leadership style was applied to promote agency using improvisational movement scores to shape individual and collective creative explorations. These explorations gave birth to a flexible and transformable dance installation that served as a metaphor for social structure. Transformation revealed itself in this research as a sequence of process and product oriented stages that resulted in a final performance piece in which a site-specific interactive installation was built before the audience's eyes. This work became a metaphor of how individual actions and interactions effect the construction of social reality and how inner-transformation and collaboration are key in the process of designing and building new egalitarian social structures.

I'll go to the end of time for you (and you don't even know my name) is an evening-length solo performance created and performed by Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal. It premiered November 8-10, 2013 in the Margaret Gisolo Dance Theatre of Arizona State University. The solo was the culmination (suspension, really) of a wild creative journey, the distillation of a process that initially involved several collaborators. Through a series of neurotically/erotically repetitive episodes of self-composed song, text, and dance, the work mines questions of the desire to be seen and the desire to feel alive. The conventions and constructs of the proscenium stage are both utilized and subverted in examining this platform as uniquely suited for revealing the nature of these experiences and their potential relationship. This document is primarily an account of the show's process--its before and after--and serves as a site of exploration, explanation, analysis, reflection, questioning, and ultimately furtherance of the practice-based research made manifest in the performances.

Since 1999, a small group of groundbreaking orchestral works for turntables and orchestra has surfaced on the concert stage. These compositions explore the possibilities of the turntables and invite an intriguing fusion of musical cultures of the classically trained musician and the hip-hop DJ. Since DJ turntablists typically follow an improvised tradition and do not read music, the composer must find an effective means of notating the turntables and collaborate with the turntablist in the execution of the work. As interest in turntables composition grows, there is a need for discussion and a compositional guide with advice based on present day works. In effort to contribute a guide for turntablism composition, my research includes a historical and composer perspective that discusses turntables techniques, operation of the equipment, digital technology, hip-hop background, history of the instrument, and works of the past and present with musical excerpts pertaining to the notation and use of the turntables. Specific sources include: RPM by Nicole Lizée, Concerto for Trumpet, Turntables, and Orchestra by Paul Leary, Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra by Gabriel Prokofiev, and Stephen Webber's turntable method book The Art of the DJ Turntable Technique. Interviews with composers Prokofiev, Lizée, and Leary have provided important primary source information regarding their experience with turntablism composition and performance. Unrelated to the above research and attached as an appendix, my composition Andrew's Ritual for Bedtime for chamber orchestra is a single movement for choreographed dance that depicts a mother preparing her energetic young son for bed. The title references the nightly rituals parents undertake in order to prepare their children for bedtime.