Maria Piedad presented her Master's thesis to NYU/Steinhardt

After several months of research, Maria Piedad presented her thesis “Ballet and the Contemporary Choreography Creation: a relation to be revealed” as one of the requirements for her Master of Arts degree in Teaching Dance in the Professions: The American Ballet Theatre Pedagogy at NYU/Steinhard.

The research question addressed if ballet, as a dance technique, facilitates or not the contemporary choreography creation. However,  Maria Piedad’s research purpose had nothing to do with ballet as facilitator of the contemporary technique performance. Conversely, she investigated about how the creative processes of contemporary choreographers, such as, Jiri Kilán, Willian Forsythe, Hans Van Manen, among others, are stimulated or not, when they work with dancers who have had a strong ballet training.  During the research process, different theoretical lens and theories were used to collect and analyze data; for instance, Modernism, Post-modernism, Avant-Garde  and the history and heritage of Judson Dance Theater and The Grand Union were taking into consideration for this research. 

This thesis was a practical complement. Maria Piedad did an extensive movement research along many hours of studio rehearsal in order to create the movement language that she used in her choreography “Á la première, á la deuxième, á la troisième...". In this way, she put in practice her theoretical analysis about ballet as facilitator of the contemporary choreography creation. This choreography was performed at the NYU/Steinhardt Masters’ Dance Concert 2013 by Steinhardt and Tisch masters students last November.