Collaboration between dance and drawing classes allows students to practice their art together

A recent collaboration between two classes at The College of Wooster provided students a unique opportunity to learn with—and from—one another. In November, students in Introduction to Drawing, taught by Marina Mangubi, Eugene and Charlene Derge Sussel professor of studio art, and Modern Dance Technique, taught by Emily Baird ’16, assistant professor of dance, came together to practice their art in a joint class. In the studio space delimited by the drawing stations, dance students improvised slow motion while drawing students sketched continuous gestures.

“As a true collaboration, it calls for complete trust on the part of students and faculty alike,” Mangubi said. “There’s not a mastermind on the dance side choreographing the piece, and there’s not a mastermind on the visual arts side making decisions about the visual forms. Everyone is contributing, and it only works if the environment is truly interactive and participatory.”

During the event, cameras trained on two of the stations streamed live projections of the drawings in progress onto the walls and onto the dancers. The dancers’ shadows were also cast onto the walls. The students were invited to switch roles, with dance students coming to a station to draw and drawing students going to the floor to move.

“My class was a beginner class, and students had only been drawing from the figure for three weeks at that point,” Mangubi said. “This was a very challenging assignment for them, but they were completely unfazed by that. In fact, they jumped into it. It really opened them up, and they felt more confident. I was amazed at how strong the drawings turned out.”

Mangubi first came up with the idea for the collaboration about 15 years ago when she began merging movement and visual art in her own studio work. “I was thinking about ways that dance improvisation would inform gesture drawing and wanted my students to experience movement through drawing,” she said. “In drawing, gesture is difficult to define verbally. It’s not easy to define visually, either. I wanted them to experience the essence of gesture in a way that’s different from the conventional classroom setting, and I thought that watching dance students improvise movement was the best way to do it.”

This was Mangubi’s third time collaborating with a colleague in the Department of Theatre and Dance to combine classes. Baird was a student in the dance class during the collaboration in 2015.

“I loved it,” Baird said. “One of the things I liked about doing that exercise and now having my students do it is that you realize how much endurance it takes. Even though the dancers are moving very slowly and making very isolated gestures, it requires an intense level of focus as well as breath and muscle control.”

The event essentially turned into a performance for the dancers, which is something Baird had hoped would happen. “The dance class has a mixture of beginner and advanced students,” she said. “But this exercise is such a unique experience; it was a good challenge for everyone. I think they felt empowered, especially those who stepped into a drawing role. I’m very proud of them. They went above and beyond what I was expecting.”

Mangubi and Baird hope to collaborate again, perhaps in an outdoor setting. They noted that Wooster provides the perfect environment for this type of academic innovation. “All faculty members have autonomy to decide how to build their programs, but we’re also encouraged to collaborate with each other and call on the expertise of our colleagues in other areas that would complement our interests,” Mangubi said. “I think this is a great example of that.”

Posted in News on February 3, 2025.