The Oberlin College Dance Department held their annual “Fall Forward” event on November 8, 9, and 10, in the Warner Center Main Space. Eight Oberlin choreographers, with backgrounds ranging from classical ballet, modern dance, acrobatics, martial arts and tricking, amazed audiences last week with the versatility and expressiveness of dance. Breathtaking movement was brought to life by Oberlin dancers, and the event also featured original music by Oberlin students, including the TIMARA Department’s very own Sam Fisher and Eastman Presser (both juniors).
Sam Fisher, on his two pieces featured in this year’s Fall Forward: “Rift is a solo piece choreographed and danced by Ben George-Hinnant. It is a wild concoction of mixed violent and peaceful gestures drawing from Ben’s experience in martial arts and tricking, but grounded in a dance framework. The score we decided to create for it is something of an atmospheric four-part chorale for distorted and reverberant synthesizers. Interia is a group piece choreographed by Elaine Liu, which I composed music for with Adam Himes [a junior Composition student at Oberlin]. Adam’s piece was originally scored for an ensemble of instrumentalists, but a performer dropped out and forced him to create a new interpretation of the piece for synthesizers and samples. This is where I came in. It’s a really fun and quirky piece of music, probably atypical to even those who came expecting the bizarre.”
Eastman Presser, on his original work featured in the event: “Hayley Larson choreographed a solo piece called Hush, and I composed a piece called The Mouth, The Medium. Our collaboration explored the differences between gesture and texture as it related to the interaction between the dance and the sound score. I played with perception of ‘synthesized’ versus ‘organic’ and ‘physical’ versus ‘mechanical’ sounds.” – MC
