ABSTRACT 
 
Title of Thesis: LOST PATTERNS: 
AN INVESTIGATION INTO TRANSLATION  
 
Rebecca Ann Marie Hill, Master of Fine Arts, 2022 
 
Thesis Directed by:   Sara Pearson, Professor, 
Dance Performance and Scholarship,  
School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies 
 
Lost Patterns was an evening length concert performed March 11?13, 2022, at the Clarice Smith 
Performing Arts Center in partial fulfillment of the M.F.A. degree in Dance from the University 
of Maryland?s School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Lost Patterns investigated 
the translation process inherent in Appalachian music and dance traditions to discover avenues of 
experimentation tethered to tradition. This percussive dance work highlighted the way the body, 
as an instrument, translates music. In collaboration with the cast, Lost Patterns excavated three 
different approaches to translation: melodic replication, improvisation, and sonic abstraction. 
These approaches invited multiple translations to occur simultaneously in the choreography and 
music, while acknowledging and honoring the dance lineages present within the performers. This 
paper is a written account of the creative process behind Lost Patterns, with ethnographic 
context and a historical framework for the dance traditions extrapolated within the work. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
LOST PATTERNS: AN INVESTIGATION INTO TRANSLATION  
 
by 
 
Rebecca Ann Marie Hill 
  
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the 
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment 
of the requirements for the degree of 
Master of Fine Arts 
2022 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Advisory Committee: 
Professor Sara Pearson, Chair 
Sam Crawford, Lecturer  
Alvin Mayes, Principal Lecturer  
Patrik Widrig, Professor 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
? Copyright by 
Rebecca Hill  
2022 
  
 
   
 
Dedication 
Lost Patterns is dedicated to all the percussive dancers out there who are keeping their dance 
traditions alive inside themselves and vibrant within their communities. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Acknowledgements 
I want to thank my cast and design team: Roxy King, Gerson Lanza, Ashton Frech, 
Paetyn Lewis, Tiffany Ospino, Daniel Coolik, Erik Spangler, Andr?s Poch, Becca Janey, Heather 
Reynolds, and Kira Peck for showing up as their vibrant selves and contributing who they are 
into Lost Patterns. You trusted my creative process, even when I brought a banjo into the space, 
and you leaned into the journey of the performance of Lost Patterns. I especially want to thank 
Roxy King and Gerson Lanza for their feedback, camaraderie, and footwork, and Erik Spangler 
and Anna Roberts-Gevalt for the nudge towards experimentation. To my supportive committee 
members, Sara Pearson, Sam Crawford, Alvin Mayes, and Patrik Widrig, as well as my M.F.A. 
cohort, thank you all for encouraging me to boldly embrace this vision. To Kate Spanos and 
Brittany Hicks, thank you for the writing feedback, and to Maggie Laszewski, thanks for 
exploring the world of improvisation with me. To my mentors and friends within the old-time 
music community, thank you for being my people and the inspiration for this show. I especially 
want to thank my mentors, Sharon Leahy, Sandy Silva, Thomas Maupin, Eileen Carson, Lou 
Maiuri, Mack Samples, Ellen and Eugene Ratcliffe, and Gerry Milnes. Lastly to my parents and 
close friends, thanks for guiding me through this MFA process. I appreciate you all. 
 
  
ii i 
   
 
Table of Contents 
Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii	
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii	
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv	
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. v	
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1	
Chapter 1: Connection to Rurality .................................................................................................. 6	
Acts of Transfer ......................................................................................................................... 10	
Chapter 2: History of Tap & Appalachian Flatfooting ................................................................. 13	
Chapter 3: Shift to Inquiry ............................................................................................................ 17	
Lost Patterns .............................................................................................................................. 20	
Road Map .................................................................................................................................. 23	
Chapter 4: Body as Instrument ..................................................................................................... 26	
Listening to Flesh Speak ........................................................................................................... 28	
Melodic Replication .................................................................................................................. 31	
Embodied Glitches .................................................................................................................... 35	
Chapter 5: Improvisation .............................................................................................................. 38	
Learning to Listen ..................................................................................................................... 38	
Improvography .......................................................................................................................... 39	
Tilt of the Head ......................................................................................................................... 45	
Chapter 6: Sonic Abstraction ........................................................................................................ 51	
Sampling an Embodied Archive ............................................................................................... 51	
Chapter 7: Design ......................................................................................................................... 56	
Chapter 8: Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 63	
Addendum ..................................................................................................................................... 66	
The Curtain Call ........................................................................................................................ 66	
Reflections from the Cast .......................................................................................................... 67	
Appendix: ?Step-a-Tune Soundweb? Compositional Score ......................................................... 70	
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 79	
 
  
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List of Figures 
Figure 1: Wheatland Music Festival, 1992. .................................................................................... 4	
Figure 2: Maple Leaf Grange, Nashville, Michigan. ...................................................................... 5	
Figure 3: Helvetia Star Band Dance Hall, Helvetia, West Virginia, 2015. .................................... 5	
Figure 4: Pre-show projections and set design look for Lost Patterns. ........................................ 25	
Figure 5: Opening to Lost Patterns. .............................................................................................. 30	
Figure 6: ?Falls of Richmond.? ..................................................................................................... 35	
Figure 7: ?Elk River Blues? .......................................................................................................... 37	
Figure 8: ?Nine Pin Willow.? ....................................................................................................... 43	
Figure 9: ?Missouri's Puzzle.? ...................................................................................................... 43	
Figure 10: Becky Hill's choreography notes for ?Greek Melody? trio. ........................................ 49	
Figure 11: ?Greek Melody.? ......................................................................................................... 50	
Figure 12: Musicians Daniel Coolik and Erik Spangler prior to ?Greek Melody.? ..................... 50	
Figure 13: ?Step-a-Tune Soundweb.? ........................................................................................... 55	
Figure 14: Color palette, landscape, and quilt pattern inspiration for costumes ........................... 57	
Figure 15: Final costume designs for Lost Patterns by Becca Janney. ........................................ 58	
Figure 16: Paint elevations for panels in Lost Patterns set design. .............................................. 59	
Figure 17: Projections and Set Design by Andr?s Poch, Lighting Design by Heather Reynolds. 60	
Figure 18: Set design research based on Polaroid emulsions for Lost Patterns by Andr?s Poch. 60	
Figure 19: Final moment of Lost Patterns. ................................................................................... 66	
 
 
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Introduction 
I grew up rural, about a fifteen-minute drive from Hastings, Michigan, a small town with 
a population of roughly seven thousand. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young echoed throughout our 
old farmhouse on repeat.1 My parents love music and were dedicated to sharing that passion with 
their children, which caused many family vacations to be scheduled around music festivals. We 
attended one festival in particular, the Wheatland Music Festival in Remus, Michigan, every 
September. 
Wheatland focused their programming on preserving and promoting traditional music and 
dance from North America. They defined the traditional arts as those ?learned person to person, 
passed down from each generation to the next, and influenced by culture, family, ethnicity, and 
era.?2 Attending Wheatland and numerous other small folk festivals caused me to grow up 
immersed in the Michigan folk music scene in the 1990s and early 2000s amidst a robust folk 
revival in the United States. The 1990s embraced multiculturalism and was an era where art 
nonprofits marketed the United States as a melting pot of cultures. The arts were significantly 
funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and Wheatland, like other festivals, curated 
their arts programming with this melting pot ideology.  
By attending Wheatland every year, I was exposed to clogging and bluegrass; flatfooting, 
square dance, and old-time music; Quebecois, Irish music, and step dance; blues, swing, tap, and 
lindy hop; zydeco, Cajun, two-step, and waltz. As a kid eager to dance, I would attend every 
dance workshop I could. Therefore, within my body, clogging steps merged with tap vocabulary, 
 
1. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were Americana singer songwriters from the 1970s. 
2. ?What Are Traditional Arts?,? Wheatland Music Organization website, updated May 30, 2013, 
https://www.wheatlandmusic.org/traditional-arts-weekend/what-are-traditional-arts/. 
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and Quebecois and Irish step dance crossed over into my improvisation to old-time music. 
Within each step dance genre was an adherence to the tradition that aimed to keep each dance 
style pure and uninfluenced by the others. However, the more I learned, the more my archive of 
steps became a collection of percussive dance vocabulary, and my dancing style coalesced from 
this process.3 
The Wheatland Music Festival is where I first saw the Fiddle Puppet Dancers and 
Rhythm in Shoes Dance Company clogging and flatfooting to live old-time music.4 I instantly 
became entranced by the joy that emanated off the stage as conversations were shared between 
musicians, dancers, and the audience. Following my exposure to clogging, my parents signed me 
up for dance lessons. At the age of twelve, they sent me to West Virginia during the summer to 
study dance at the Augusta Heritage Center.5 This trip initiated a yearly pilgrimage to study 
dance in West Virginia, where I eventually chose to live full-time. Following the training I 
received at the Augusta Heritage Center, I was invited to apprentice with Footworks Percussive 
Dance Ensemble and Rhythm in Shoes Dance Company while in high school. However, post-
graduation, due to the climate of the arts in 2007, both companies were not in a position to hire a 
full-time company member. But I kept dancing, and at the age of nineteen, drawn to Appalachian 
traditional arts, I moved to Elkins, West Virginia, to attend Davis & Elkins College. I ended up 
living in Elkins for roughly a decade where I worked for the Augusta Heritage Center, 
conducting dance ethnography and traditional arts programming. 
 
3. I define percussive dance as a dance form that makes sound intentionally through kinesthetic movement. 
4. The Fiddle Puppet Dancers and Rhythm in Shoes were two professional clogging and flatfooting ensembles 
that toured nationally and internationally during the folk revival of the 1990s and 2000s. 
5. Augusta Heritage Center, ?About Us,? accessed April 3, 2022, https://augustaartsandculture.org/about-us/. 
The Augusta Heritage Center is a traditional arts nonprofit located in Elkins, West Virginia, dedicated to preserving 
and promoting roots music, dance, and folklore from the United States. 
2  
   
 
Appalachian flatfooting captivated me with its dedication to accenting the melody and 
groove of fiddle music through intricate shifts of weight and complicated foot articulation. 
Flatfooting footwork is close to the floor, with a relaxed upper body that shifts cross laterally, 
with an effortless bounce through the knees and ankles. The footwork uses shuffles, slides, digs, 
brushes, and toe and heel patterns in time to accompany old-time music. Flatfooting occurs in 
spaces where traditional music is being played, and the dancing is part of the soundscape just as 
much as the fiddle tunes. Square dance figures, calling patter, flatfoot steps, and the tunes are all 
oral traditions passed down knee-to-knee and elbow-to-elbow.6 They are shared in crowded, 
sweaty dance halls late at night with booze on the tongue, underneath the open sky at outdoor 
festivals, or after numerous cups of coffee in an inviting community hall. In these traditions there 
is no clear delineation between who is the teacher and who is the student. Steps are caught on the 
fly, and the transmission of these traditions is centered around an exchange between two people 
within a community. From those experiences, I learned to call square dances, play clawhammer 
banjo, and became part of the local music and dance community in Randolph County, West 
Virginia. 
A vital part of my immersion into Appalachian music and dance is connected to my 
relationship with folklorist Gerald Milnes and his family. I assisted Milnes during his last two 
years as the Folk Arts Coordinator at the Augusta Heritage Center. Together, we developed a 
heritage tourism project, The Mountain Dance Trail, which revitalized square dances in rural 
communities throughout the state. When I would walk into those dance halls in West Virginia, I 
felt like I was walking into the Maple Leaf Grange Hall, a community hall in rural Michigan 
 
6. Patter is a colloquial term for the rhymes and rhythms of square dance calling. 
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about five miles from my childhood home.7 Both dance halls share the same wooden floor 
weathered from generations of dancers, and the sounds of musicians strumming their instruments 
echo throughout the hall. The grange is where my neighbors, Norma and Bernard Weeks, taught 
me how to square dance and waltz, and where I learned how to translate my clogging and tap 
steps from the dance studio into improvisation to live music. Those Tuesday night weekly grange 
jam sessions were an intergenerational space to gather, a place where community came together 
to socialize, play music, and dance. Looking back at those memories, I see how my rural 
upbringing in Michigan laid the groundwork for my deep connection to Appalachian music and 
dance traditions. There is a humbleness to Appalachian cultural traditions that resonated with me 
in ways that studio dance practices never have. My understanding of these traditions developed 
through an immersive participation in Appalachian culture, but also through an understanding of 
what it was like to grow up in a rural community. 
 
Figure 1: Wheatland Music Festival, 1992. 
Becky Hill, age four, dancing on the dance boards in front 
of the mainstage. Photo by Dorothy Hill. 
 
7. The Maple Leaf Grange is a community hall in Barry County, Michigan, that served as meeting place for 
farmers in the area, but also as a place for dances, music sessions, and maple syrup processing. 
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Figure 2: Maple Leaf Grange, Nashville, Michigan. 
Photo by Michael Barrows. 
 
Figure 3: Helvetia Star Band Dance Hall, Helvetia, West Virginia, 2015. 
This photo was captured during the Helvetia Hoot, an old-time festival that I organize annually with Tyler 
Crawford. Photo by Andrew Carroll. 
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Chapter 1: Connection to Rurality 
 The role of improvisation within Appalachia is one of invention and is an engrained 
aspect of living in rural mountain communities. ?Improvisation does not imply ?anything goes,? 
or an unstructured approach. Structure is what makes improvisation possible,? stated scholar 
Michael Corbett in the Journal of Research in Rural Education.8 Through this lens, I conceive of 
the mountains as a structure that impacts daily decision-making and incites improvisation. As an 
example, while living in Elkins, West Virginia, the nearest garden center was a forty-minute 
drive away. Instead of driving that distance to purchase tomato cages for my garden, I 
repurposed materials I already had. That creativity is a practice in innovation that emerges when 
resources are limited. For generations, rural communities have relied on improvisational 
traditions as a tool used to problem solve, share the workload with others, and to imagine new 
possibilities.9 
Today Appalachians still employ multiple livelihood strategies to diversify their income 
sources.10 With the world?s demand for coal fluctuating during the Depression and World War II, 
?coal mining families regularly fell back on kin, neighborhood labor and resource pooling to 
make ends meet through combining gardening and animal husbandry, hunting and fishing, and 
 
8. Michael Corbett, ?Improvisation as a Curricular Metaphor: Imagining Education for a Rural Creative Class,? 
Journal of Research in Rural Education 28, no. 10 (2013): 8?9, https://sites.psu.edu/jrre/wp-
content/uploads/sites/6347/2014/02/28-15.pdf. 
9. US Census, ?Rural America,? accessed April 14, 2022, 
https://mtgisportal.geo.census.gov/arcgis/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=49cd4bc9c8eb444ab51218c1d5001ef6.
The US Census defines rural as all people, housing, and territory that is not urban. 
10. Jefferson C. Boyer, ?Reinventing the Appalachian Commons,? Social Analysis 50, no. 3 (2006): 217?232, 
https://doi.org/10.3167/015597706780459377.220. Multiple livelihood strategies are where people diversify their 
income generating and resource gathering to manage risk arising from personal financial crisis. This includes 
activities that bring in income, as well as unpaid work such as hunting, fishing, foraging, and sharing resources with 
family and neighbors. 
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bartering and petty marketing,? stated Appalachian scholar Jefferson Boyer.11 Pooling resources 
and relying on neighborhood labor is still common within working-class communities, and as a 
result, these ideologies are prevalent within Appalachian cultural traditions and are echoed 
within flatfooting. 
On Friday nights at the Floyd Country Store in Floyd, Virginia, there are usually more 
than fifty dancers crowded in front of a live Appalachian string band. The dancers bob up and 
down, pulsating a groove that mimics the ?boom-chuck? rhythm of the guitar and upright bass. 
From a distance, the dancers all appear to be doing the same step; however, as you navigate the 
dance floor, you witness how each dancer?s footwork embodies their own variations while 
remaining interlocked with each other. The dancing bodies share a unified sensation while they 
engage in a soloistic improvisational practice. The labor of holding the rhythm is shared among 
all the people dancing, while they simultaneously validate each individual?s choice making. At 
the Floyd Country Store, it is less about the virtuosity of each dancer and more about sharing the 
workload of rhythm. Each individual?s improvisations contribute to the collective experience on 
the dance floor, mirroring a common community structure in Appalachia. 
While sharing the same space and dancing to the same tune, dancers catch 
embellishments and variations from each other and the musicians. The repetitive structure of the 
tune invites improvisation to occur. In this process, variations are inevitable as the form is passed 
down from one person to another through oral and kinesthetic transmission.12 In this way, 
variation is both part of the ?oral tradition,? as well as a springboard for improvisation. You can 
identify variations in the bowing of the fiddle, the rhythm of the clawhammer banjo, and in the 
 
11. Boyer, ?Reinventing the Appalachian Commons,? 220. 
12. I define variation as a modification or ornamentation added to or subtracted from the tradition as it is 
transmitted. 
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ways each individual flatfoot dancer negotiates weightedness and tonality in the sounds of their 
steps. 
Many dancers in a community like the one at the Floyd Country Store share a similar 
footwork vocabulary, but this vocabulary is not prescribed. Many dancers improvise and ?do 
their own thing.?13 As an improvising percussive dancer myself, the joy of sharing space and 
collecting steps on the fly is what brings me to the dance floor. When the string band plays a fast 
fiddle tune between square dances, dancers pack the floor and improvise their own freestyle 
footwork. The transmission of steps passes between dancers as they sidle up next to each other, 
mimic each other's steps, and then move onto someone else, repeating this process throughout 
the duration of the tune. Often practitioners describe this transmission within flatfooting as being 
?caught, not taught.? This process is about catching the weight, musicality, and timbre of the 
steps and less about perfecting the footwork exactly. Lou Maiuri, a master square caller and 
clogger from Summersville, West Virginia, describes flatfooting as a ?sensation that comes from 
within in connection to the music.?14 
The invitation to freely express oneself within the structure of the tune, or within the 
structure of a rural community, holds the potential for people to problem solve and create 
something new with whatever tools are available. Dance scholar Gail Matthews-DeNatale stated, 
In this stylistic fusion of freedom and group cooperation, traditional mountain dance 
celebrates the possibility of community members working together to achieve a goal 
while allowing each person to maintain and develop their unique identity. This ability to 
operate well as an independent person within a larger group effort was undoubtedly 
crucial to the collaborative barn raising, farming, and harvesting of agrarian life.15 
 
13. Phil Jamison, Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance (Urbana: University 
of Illinois Press), 149.  
14. Gerald Milnes and Rebecca Hill, prods, Reel ?Em Boys, Reel ?Em (Elkins, WV: Augusta Heritage 
Productions, 2012), DVD. 
15. Gail Matthew-DeNatale, ?Wild and Yet Really Subdued: Cultural Change, Stylistic Diversification, and 
Personal Choice in Traditional Appalachian Dance,? in Communities in Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition 
 
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Improvisational traditions in Appalachia are rooted in agrarian work practices, although today 
the most prevalent industries in West Virginia are healthcare, education, retail, and the food 
industry.16 Many of these jobs involve repetitive tasks that depend on the individual contributing 
to a larger collective. The rhythm prevalent in shared labor practices is embodied in these 
careers, and in maintaining cultural practices, including the dancing at the Floyd Country Store 
and other dance halls throughout the Appalachian region. 
Therefore, if I define improvisation as the freedom to live within a structure, then 
flatfooting can be conceptualized as mirroring the rurality of Appalachian living. Structure 
welcomes improvisation into the process, leaving space for interpretation, individuality, and 
questions. The ?improvising human body is a vessel that allows for imagining, creating, 
receiving, and interpreting,? and reflects an ability to pivot in reaction to present circumstances.17 
This invites each dancer to improvise with the steps they have and innovate or expand upon the 
tradition to evolve the dance form further. Old-time musicians often speak of getting entranced 
by the repetitive structure of a fiddle tune, causing them to slip into a meditative state interlocked 
with others within a jam session.18 This meditative state is where musicians and dancers season 
the fiddle tune with their own variations. What if I linger on this note just a little longer? What if 
I try on someone else?s dance steps; can I catch what they?re doing? Why not add footwork as I 
navigate through this square dance? Why not ask my neighbor for help changing my oil as 
opposed to paying for it? What if I reuse this metal frame as a trellis in my garden instead of 
 
in America?s Southeast and Beyond, ed. Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 
1995), 123. 
16. I use West Virginia as an example of Appalachia because it is the only state completely within the 
Appalachian Mountain region, and is where I lived for almost ten years. 
17. Rebecca Dirksen, After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy: Carnival, Politics, and Musical Engagement in 
Haiti (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 16. 
18. Ben Nelson, Emily Schaad, and Hannah Johnson (old-time musicians), conversation with author, November 
23, 2021. Meditative experiences in jam sessions are common within the old-time music community. 
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buying something new? There is space in these questions to evolve, and to create something new 
that offers possibilities that might not otherwise be considered. Each individual?s choice and 
expressivity reflect the question of what it means to be Appalachian and serves as a source of 
identity. As I compare the improvisation found in the economy and culture of Appalachia to the 
music and dance traditions from the region, I see commonalities dictated by structures and 
molded by choice. 
Acts of Transfer 
I always returned to Appalachia because the community, the cultural practices, and the 
landscape felt like home to me. I learned to flatfoot through a process that performance studies 
scholar Diana Taylor describes as a ?vital act of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, 
memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated or ?twice-behaved? behavior.?19 I traded steps 
with dancers informally in the corners of dance halls amidst a bustling square dance or learned a 
banjo tune in the kitchen as a meal cooked. My mentors became my friends, and they shared 
their homes, meals, and steps with me as a way of passing on the tradition. Percussive dance 
scholar Janet Schroeder calls this ?ongoingness,? which is a ?philosophy of continuation, of 
maintenance, of preservation and perpetuation, an enduring practice and constant outpouring.?20 
This intimate ongoingness between student and teacher is an essential value within folk 
traditions in which learning comes from nurturing relationships and spending time together. 
 
19. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: 
Duke University Press, 2007), 2?52. 
20. Janet Schroeder, ?Ethnic and Racial Formation on the Concert Stage: A Comparative Analysis of Tap Dance 
and Appalachian Step Dance? (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2018), 8. 
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Because I grew up in a multicultural folk revival, mentors from many different percussive 
dance traditions shared their ongoingness with me. This caused a variety of step dance traditions 
to cross-pollinate within my body. I collected steps and stories from mentors and then translated 
what they taught me into footwork that would fit within the structures of Appalachian old-time 
music. By interjecting percussive dance vocabulary outside of Appalachian traditions, I 
participated in a process that mirrored how vernacular dance forms have evolved in the United 
States. Access and resources caused tap and flatfooting to become the primary foundation of my 
dance vocabulary. The history, stories, rhythmic sensibilities, and weight shifts of both tap and 
flatfooting mixed together in my moving body, within my own physical archive. Like all 
vernacular artforms from the United States, this archive is beautiful, complex, and challenging. 
Music journalist Justin Hiltner described the embodied archive of American music and dance as 
follows: 
American music and dance have always gone hand-in-hand. Immigrants, bringing their 
folk traditions, art, and music to North America, combined and cross-pollinated with and 
stole and borrowed from the art and music of Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and 
African Americans. In that beautiful, conflicted, human melting pot way we arrived at the 
incredible roots genres of our modern time.21 
Drawn to percussive dance traditions and improvisation, I grapple with the fact that my 
embodied archive contains multiple vernacular dance forms from the United States while 
simultaneously valuing the possibility that exists within the cross-pollination of these dance 
forms. Collaboration across racial divides has resulted in a large amount of interracial music and 
dance repertoire in the United States. However, Jim Crow laws, commercialization, and a world 
shaped by white supremacy has and will continue to reinforce the color line between black and 
 
21. Justin Hiltner, ?Nic Gareiss: The Subtle Art of Queering Traditional Dance,? The Bluegrass Situation, 
August 31, 2018, https://thebluegrasssituation.com/read/nic-gareiss-the-subtle-art-of-queering-traditional-dance/. 
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white music and dance traditions.22 As an academic scholar, I have been conditioned to see tap 
and flatfooting as separated by race; however, this perspective often ignores a long history of 
dancers borrowing, mixing, and sampling percussive dance forms alongside each other.  
 
22. Cultural Historian Karl Hagstrom Miller discusses the parallel process that occurred within blues and country 
music in his book, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke 
University Press, 2010). 
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Chapter 2: History of Tap & Appalachian Flatfooting 
When working with vernacular dance forms from the United States, steps are history. 
They contain the experiences of our ancestors and the world in which they lived. These 
vernacular dance forms were passed down through malleable oral histories. Race and economic 
factors shaped?and continue to shape?who is given credit for what dance step or tune. As a 
choreographer, it is my responsibility to piece together fragments of these histories to 
acknowledge the lineages of these dance forms. I use the word lineage to describe the social, 
political, and cultural landscapes that gave rise to a dance form. This context informs how the 
dance is taught, embodied, and valued. Vernacular dance carries the ideologies and histories of a 
community, and each dancer embodies those stories when they dance. 
Tap dance and Appalachian flatfooting are both indigenous United States percussive 
dance forms that developed out of an Irish-Afro fusion in the early 1700s, starting with the cross 
racial interaction between Irish indentured servants and enslaved West Africans in the southern 
part of the United States.23 Both dance traditions embrace the body as a musical instrument by 
using precise rhythmic footwork to sculpt worlds of sound. The merging of West African and 
Irish step-dance is witnessed in the slight bend in the knees, relaxed upper torso, and interaction 
with the floor through intricate footwork. Tap dance and flatfooting share similar origins but 
evolved in different environments?tap dance migrated to urban areas, and flatfooting to 
Appalachia. During the 1800s and 1900s, Irish, African American, and enslaved performers 
interacted within the minstrel circuit in urban areas of the northeastern part of the United States. 
 
23. Constance Valis Hill?s article, ?Tap Dance in America: A Very Short History,? (New York City Public 
Library online) expands on the origins of tap dance, and she is a strong proponent of this research. 
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Amid this period, tap dance began to thrive in urban areas and continued to parallel the musical 
genre that would become jazz music, while flatfooting remained tethered to Appalachian string 
band music and rural landscapes. Tap dance scholar Constance Valis Hill states that tap dance 
evolved over a three-hundred-year process and ?developed as a musical form parallel to jazz 
music, sharing rhythmic motifs, polyrhythm, multiple meters, elements of swing, and structured 
improvisation.?24 This parallelism still exists today as tap dance evolves alongside hip-hop, 
rhythm and blues, jazz, swing, and many other musical genres. Meanwhile, Appalachian 
flatfooting has continued to parallel rural fiddle traditions from the Appalachian Mountain region 
of the United States, mainly Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and 
Georgia. Although it is a common misconception that Appalachia is isolated due to geography, 
the region has always had access to pop culture through traveling minstrel shows, vaudeville, 
radio, and later television. 
In the early 19th century, blackface minstrelsy was the largest pop culture phenomenon in 
the United States, and its sensationalism reached rural areas as well as city centers. As jazz 
musician W.C. Handy put it, ?The best talent of that generation came down the same drain?the 
minstrel show got them all.?25 Clogging, flatfooting, buckdance, and tap all co-existed, and 
influenced each other in ways that are inextricable. The banjo, a stringed instrument with a 
drumhead, was the foundation of the minstrel show. Born as a result of the encounters between 
Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and South America, the banjo reflects the United States in a 
world shaped by slavery. As scholar Laurent Dubois states, ?The banjo has had many 
meanings?the sound of progress, the sound of protest?the sound of America. Most of all, the 
 
24. Hill, ?Tap Dance in America,? 2. 
25. Brian Seibert, What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), 
109. 
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banjo has been the sound of solidarity, of gathering in the midst of exile, of being together, and 
in so doing being able to recount the past and imagine a future.?26 The banjo in many ways is a 
symbol of the complicated origins of all vernacular traditions from the United States and sits at 
the intersection where tap and flatfooting originated. Only through acknowledging this past are 
we able to ?imagine a future.? 
Blackface minstrelsy was eventually replaced by vaudeville, and its performance circuits 
traveled through rural and urban areas, including Appalachia. Rural Appalachian audiences 
witnessed tap dance being performed for decades on stage. Local dancers attempted to replicate 
steps they saw performed, interjecting them into their own regional music and dance styles. This 
mimicry fueled overlapping footwork vocabulary between tap and flatfooting, including shuffles, 
digs, and slides, with local variations emerging across the region. Both tap and flatfooting 
validate mimicry as an entry point into improvisation, choreography, and innovation, while 
respecting and naming each dance step?s origins. Constance Valis Hill defines mimicry as 
?necessary for the mastery of the form. The dynamic and synergistic process of copying to invent 
something new is most important.?27 Steps such as the Charleston, the popular jazz move from 
the 1920s, ebbed its way into flatfooting repertoire. Similarly, the paradiddle can be found in D. 
Ray White?s flatfooting vocabulary.28 This interplay is still present today as Caleb Teicher 
manipulates flatfooting using Robert Dotson?s Tennessee walking step in ?Bzzz,?29 a 2019 
 
26. Laurent Dubois, The Banjo: America's African Instrument (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard 
University Press, 2016), 384. 
27. Hill, ?Tap Dance in America,? 2. 
28. A paradiddle is known as a paddle and roll; it is a sixteenth note step popularized by master tap dancer John 
Bubbles and was apparent in D. Ray White?s dancing. D. Ray was a flatfoot dancer from Boone County, WV. 
29. The Tennessee walking step is a sixteenth note flatfooting step created by Robert Dotson of Sugar Grove, 
North Carolina, which was popularized by the Fiddle Puppet Dancers and is similar to a paradiddle in tap dance. It 
consists of a step, scuff, drag, brush, step. 
15  
   
 
choreographic collaboration with beatboxer Chris Celiz.30 The commercialization of music forms 
associated with tap and flatfooting also fueled this mimicry process.31 Clogging and flatfooting 
were seen and heard on the Grand Ole Opry and National Barn Dance, while tap dance was 
prevalent in traveling shows and Hollywood films. Since both percussive dance forms were 
accessible to mainstream media, they were able to borrow steps from each other while 
simultaneously creating two distinct United States percussive dance forms. 
  
 
30. Gia Kourlas, ?What Goes into This Minute of Tap,? New York Times, July 26, 2019, 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/arts/dance/what-goes-into-this-minute-of-tap.html. 
31. Miller, Segregating Sound. Miller?s book describes the parallel process that occurred within blues and 
country music. 
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Chapter 3: Shift to Inquiry 
As a dancer steeped in percussive dance, I chose to seek my MFA in dance at the 
University of Maryland within a postmodern dance program. My intention was not to become a 
professional postmodern dancer, but to learn and absorb the methodologies and choreographic 
techniques prevalent within postmodern and contemporary dance forms. During this journey, 
translation surfaced as a practice that guided my educational MFA trajectory.32 Translation 
wasn?t a new concept for me as it is an inherent part of the ?passing it on? process that occurs 
within folk traditions. However, translating movement vocabulary and choreographic techniques 
into my percussive dance mediums caused new neural and physical connections to occur within 
my body and mind daily. The experience of constant translation was humbling and tiring at times 
and being surrounded by colleagues with extensive careers in postmodern, contemporary, and 
ballet forms caused discomfort to surface. Instead of letting the discomfort completely shape my 
experience, I let it inspire me to ask questions. 
The shift from discomfort to inquiry deepened my choreographic practice and creative 
processing.33 It caused me to think about developing choreographies using the materials of 
percussive dance and rearranging them as if I was a painter working from a color palette. This 
allowed me to grant myself permission to detach from the adherence to tradition in both tap and 
flatfooting to discover potentiality. I began to develop choreography from a broader percussive 
dance perspective, which paralleled the choreographic concepts my colleagues were employing 
in their postmodern and contemporary investigations. Working within the medium of percussive 
 
32. I refer to translation as the conversion of something from one medium into another. 
33. Liz Lerman, the master artist for the 2018 OneBeat program, shared this perspective during her residency, 
and it has since shaped my outlook on discomfort in an entirely new way. 
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dance challenged me to constantly think about how the body generates sound through a 
corporeal, sonic, and visual approach to generating choreography. 
Looking at footwork vocabulary through a broader lens of percussive dance gave me the 
opportunity to let dance forms rub up against each other. This provided me with distance to see 
the complicated floor patterns existent in square dances and extract elements of them without 
replicating them. The traditional old-time music and dance community was so instilled in me that 
it took the distance and perspective of graduate school, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, to step 
outside of the tradition and look at it from new angles. This MFA program allowed me to explore 
the tension between tradition and innovation, sampling, merging, and blending elements of tap, 
flatfooting, and postmodern dance to create original contemporary choreographies. Within that 
process I was able to ask myself, ?What variations can I contribute to Appalachian percussive 
dance? What is my role and what are my responsibilities as a choreographer working within 
vernacular dance traditions? Where can I invite collaboration into the space to evolve percussive 
dance further?? 
The dance traditions I was extrapolating conjure up history every time I dance the 
Tennessee walking step,34 do a paddle ?n? roll,35 or play Ernie Carpenter?s ?Elk River Blues? on 
the clawhammer banjo.36 Many of the tradition bearers I studied from have passed on, but their 
steps and tunes remain in circulation because they exist within my repertoire. Through 
 
34. The Tennessee walking step is a sixteenth note flatfooting step created by the late Robert Dotson of Sugar 
Grove, North Carolina. I met Dotson at the Appalachian Studies Association Conference and we became friends 
later in his life. The Tennessee walking step became a standardized flatfooting basic step that was taught by the 
Fiddle Puppet Dancers, Green Grass Cloggers, and many others.  
35. ?International Tap Dance Hall of Fame, Biographies, John Bubbles,? American Tap Dance Hall of Fame, 
March 1, 2022, https://www.atdf.org/hall-of-fame-bios. Also known as a paradiddle, a paddle ?n? roll is a sixteenth-
note tap step popularized by master tap dancer John Bubbles. 
36. Traditional Tune Archive, ?Elk River Blues,? accessed April 1, 2022, 
https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Elk_River_Blues/. ?Elk River Blues? is a fiddle tune composed in 1985 by the 
late Ernie Carpenter of Sutton, West Virginia. He wrote the tune as he watched his childhood home flood due to the 
construction of the Sutton Dam by the US Army Corps of Engineers.  
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embodying Appalachian old-time traditions, I am able to keep these traditions alive. Folklore 
scholars Ray Cashman, Tom Mould, and Pravina Shukla define tradition as a process and a 
resource in The Individual and Tradition. Tradition as a process disrupts the association of 
tradition with stasis, and instead frames tradition as simultaneously embracing variations, 
innovation, and evolution. Tradition as a resource labels it as a raw material inherited by each 
generation, a malleable substance that an individual can mold. Reimagining tradition as a 
resource invites the artist to become ?a crafty recycler who constructs new possibilities out of 
available handed-down raw materials, meeting present needs.?37 As a practitioner of traditional 
arts, I collect knowledge from dancers, musicians, and artisans. And as a choreographer, I 
recycle and reuse those materials to devise choreographic works. 
I approach choreography as a process of curation developed collaboratively with my cast. 
It is circumstantial and shaped to reflect the contributions of my cast, and the lineages they 
embody. The work has a life of its own, and my role as choreographer is to create structure, 
direction, or a guiding question to elicit input from the entire ensemble. I ask the cast throughout 
the process, ?What do you hear? What do you bring to the table? How does it feel for you?? The 
collaboration becomes a communal practice that invites the instincts of each performer onto the 
stage and into the work. This approach echoes the ongoingness that was shared with me by my 
mentors and creates a space for collaborative exchange. Through an oral and physical 
transmission process, my dance mentors taught me footwork and then asked me, ?What are you 
going to do with it?? In conversation with Roxy King, a professional tap dancer and member of 
my cast, we discussed how both tap and flatfooting traditions carry a sense of responsibility to 
share what you know with dancers you trust. King stated if we don?t share and create new 
 
37. Ray Cashman, Tom Mould, and Pravina Shukla, eds, The Individual and Tradition: Folkloristic Perspectives 
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 3?10. 
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footwork, ?the dance form won?t grow. It will stop with me.? The goal is not to replicate or mass 
produce dancing in a certain style; it is to create space for individual contributions to expand the 
possibilities of percussive dance further. 
Lost Patterns 
In my MFA thesis investigation, Lost Patterns, I examine Appalachian folk traditions to 
reconsider a creative relationship to translation and variation. I focus on the way the body, as an 
instrument, translates Appalachian music. By inviting multiple artists from a variety of 
percussive dance and music traditions into collaboration, I welcomed numerous translations to 
occur simultaneously. Together with five dancers?Ashton Frech, Roxy King, Gerson Lanza, 
Paetyn Lewis, and Tiffany Ospino; two musicians?Daniel Coolik and Erik Spangler; and three 
designers?Heather Reynolds (lighting), Becca Janney (costumes), and Andr?s Poch (projections 
and set); we devised an experiential performance that investigated translation to unearth avenues 
for experimentation tethered to tradition. In collaboration with my cast, we transcribed and 
transposed Appalachian music into choreography through three different approaches to 
translation: melodic replication, improvisation, and sonic abstraction. 
 I translated the musical phrasings and structures of several Appalachian tunes into 
choreographic material using melodic replication as the foundation. Throughout this process, I 
tracked where and when I felt an impulse to resist the replication, and where I wanted to sink 
into the trance of melody. I used melodic replication as a mode to question and understand the 
way the body is depicted as an instrument and how I specifically use that instrument. 
Using this choreographic process, we wanted to invite the audience to listen to the body 
speak. The tunes selected to translate, using melodic replication, were several crooked 
20  
   
 
Appalachian tunes. A crooked tune refers to a tune that diverges from expected timing or 
phrasing; for example, a tune with extra beats added to or dropped from a phrase, or a tune with 
multiple parts that are arranged in peculiar ways. Most of the tunes selected for Lost Patterns are 
crooked and share a regional hyper-specificity to West Virginia. These crooked tunes twist and 
turn in ways a paradiddle from tap dance might better serve the choreography than a clogging 
basic. The crossroads where percussive dance forms merge is the place where collaboration 
guided my choreography in Lost Patterns. 
Improvisation is a communal process within tap and flatfooting, and the exchange 
between the individual and the community is what I wanted to preserve in the choreographic 
work of Lost Patterns. I explored choreographic composition through improvisation as a means 
of translating in real-time and framing an idea from beginning to end. The conversational tone 
improvisation ignites is a rigorous practice valued in both tap and flatfooting. In fact, 
improvisation is integral to all vernacular dance forms from the United States, and it 
encompasses many approaches depending on setting, tradition, function, and other factors. 
Jonathan David Jackson points out that for, ?vernacular dancing in its original sociocultural 
contexts, where there is no division between improvisation and composition?improvisation 
means the creative structuring, or choreographing, of human movement in the moment.?38 The 
questions ?What if?? and ?Why not?? fuel improvisation and my creative work, while also 
reflecting the economic and cultural landscape of the Appalachian Mountains. 
As a way of processing the complexities of my music and dance lineage, I collaborated 
with Erik Spangler, and together we translated folk traditions through technology, through sonic 
abstraction. We collected and sampled sound clips from my embodied archive and Appalachia, 
 
38. Naomi Bragin, ?Shot and Captured: Turf Dance, YAK films, and the Oakland, California, RIP Project,? 
TDR/The Drama Review 58 vol. 2 (2014): 99?114, https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00349. 
21  
   
 
combining them with tones generated by a modular synthesizer to create a mosaic of live and 
archival materials. By digging into how these traditions could be repurposed and transformed, I 
was able to activate generative avenues for experimentation. For traditions to endure, adaptation 
is essential. 
By welcoming each dancer?s lineage into the work, we were able to highlight the 
moments where we shared the same embodied knowledge, without compromising everyone?s 
individuality. A shuffle is a shuffle across many percussive dance forms, but the way the body 
articulates that shuffle is dependent on each dancer?s training. By bringing multiple percussive 
dance forms together in conversation, I wanted to highlight the visual and sonic diversity offered 
by percussive dance. Gerson Lanza and Roxy King have spent their lives steeped in tap dance, 
and they currently perform in numerous professional tap ensembles. Tiffany Ospino is trained in 
flamenco, hip-hop, modern, and bachata; Ashton Frech in hip-hop and tap; and Paetyn Lewis in 
modern, hip-hop, tap, and Irish step dance. My training includes an array of North American 
percussive dance styles with focus on Appalachian flatfooting, clogging, and tap, influences of 
modern, and a variety of social dance practices. Although we came from diverse dance 
backgrounds, the entire dance cast shared the vocabulary of tap dance, which caused tap to 
become the dance form we began to generate choreography from. Similarly, I chose two 
musicians from different musical backgrounds who shared an interest in improvisation and 
Appalachian music. Daniel Coolik is a multi-instrumentalist who grew up steeped in bluegrass 
and Appalachian old-time music. He now resides in Lafayette, Louisiana, and can be found 
playing Congolese rumba, jazz, Cajun, and zydeco music. Erik Spangler is a composer, DJ, and 
experimental musician from Baltimore, Maryland. Every cast member offered their own 
perspective into the making of this choreographic work, and their participation within the 
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collaborative process helped shape the show. Therefore, Lost Patterns is a collection of 
translations developed by the whole cast that welcomes each individual's interpretations into the 
creative process. 
Road Map 
The performance of Lost Patterns was created to provide a road map for the audience to 
follow, and it is my intent for my writing to do the same. While creating Lost Patterns, I 
navigated between the past and present by scaffolding the sonic and visual experience to 
highlight the intricacies of the passing of time. The choreography reflected the cyclical nature of 
the collective human experience, guiding the audience through the evolution of a day, a season, 
or a lifetime. My writing similarly sheds light on the chronological evolution of my creative 
process into translation. 
To analyze the evolution of the work, I first want to provide a guide through the 
performance. Lost Patterns took the audience on a journey, starting with the sound of the a 
cappella human voice, and ending with a conversation between a dancer and a modular 
synthesizer. Most tunes throughout the show were reimaginings of traditional Appalachian old-
time music, except for the jazz standard ?Willow Weep for Me,? and several original 
compositions by Erik Spangler and Daniel Coolik.39 The juxtaposition between jazz and old-time 
was referenced throughout the show in both sonic and embodied ways. 
 
39. ?Willow Weep for Me? is a popular jazz standard composed in 1932 by Ann Ronell. 
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The show opened with humming and lilting that referenced the melody of ?Boll 
Weevil,?40 inviting the dancers to improvise solos on a step-a-tune at center stage.41 This 
communal experience transformed into a conversation between acoustic banjo and footwork. The 
footwork replicated the melody of the old-time tune ?Falls of Richmond,? and the banjo 
provided a rhythmic drone to propel the choreography.42 This conversation ended with a 
virtuosic tap solo from King, where she referenced the historical exchange between banjo and 
tap dance. 
I then entered playing ?Elk River Blues? on banjo, which aimed to introduce the question 
of who is musician and who is dancer within the work, and highlighted how those roles are 
interchangeable. ?Elk River Blues? was a trio that embraced full body movement vocabulary and 
welcomed electric guitar into the translation process. This was followed by ?Nine Pin Willow,? a 
choreography that remixed social dance practices, asking the musicians and dancers to move 
throughout the work. King, Lanza, and I then performed ?Greek Melody,? a trio that negotiated 
between tap and flatfooting vocabulary with excerpts of improvisation.43 As part of this trio, 
Spangler began to interject his soundscape, guiding the audience into ?Dirge for the Holler,? and 
welcoming them into experimentation.44 ?Step-a-Tune Soundweb,? a duet for flatfooting and 
modular synthesizer, dove fully into experimentation and referenced sound samples from 
Appalachia. Lost Patterns ended by returning to the vocalizations of humming to signify the 
cyclical nature of folk traditions and life. 
 
40. ?Boll Weevil? is a traditional old-time tune often played on clawhammer banjo; this version comes from the 
stylings of Dwight Diller. 
41. Similar to a tap board, a ?step-a-tune? is a colloquial term for a wooden dance board common within old-
time music traditions; they are often made of plywood and are usually around 3x3 feet in size. 
42. The traditional Appalachian fiddle tune, ?Falls of Richmond,? can be traced back to 1845 to the Hammons 
family of Pocahontas County, West Virginia. 
43. ?Greek Melody? is an Appalachian fiddle tune that was passed down to me from the playing of the late 
George Lee Hawkins from Bath County, Kentucky. 
44. ?Dirge from the Holler? is an original composition by Erik Spangler. 
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The choreography was a fast-paced evolution through sound that investigated translation 
through embodiment. Transitions throughout the performance and this writing impart the 
knowledge of mentors, scholars, and friends, placing them in conversation with my creative 
process. These voices provide context and create a picture larger than I could illustrate alone. 
This written thesis provides a window into the creative process of Lost Patterns by stepping the 
reader chronologically through the choreographic investigations into translation in the order they 
were presented in the performance. 
 
Figure 4: Pre-show projections and set design look for Lost Patterns. 
Projection and Set Design by Andr?s Poch. Photo by Jonathan Hsu. 
  
2 5 
   
 
Chapter 4: Body as Instrument 
I?m a dancer that likes to dance to whatever music is being played or whatever tune is 
being played. I try to dance to that tune and try to match my sounds with that tune.  
?Thomas Maupin45 
My percussive dance training taught me to regard the physical body as a musical 
instrument, and that approach granted me opportunities to participate in music residencies where 
I was the only dancer present. In 2018, I was selected as a OneBeat Fellow in a cultural 
diplomacy program through the US State Department and Found Sound Nation.46 Respected as 
both a dancer and musician, I collaborated with thirty-one musicians from around the world. In 
2021, I served as a Strathmore Artist-in-Residence with six other musicians from the DC area.47 
These experiences introduced me to intricate musical ideas and trained me to consider crafting 
choreography in ways that guide the listener through a sonic concept. 
I entered my MFA program immediately after the OneBeat tour and was surprised to 
discover the way I interpreted the body as an instrument clashed with the ideologies of several of 
my colleagues and professors. I had always conceived of the body as an instrument from a purely 
musical interpretation. Reading Marcel Mauss?s ?Techniques of the Body? within my first 
semester at the University of Maryland introduced me to seeing the body as a technical and 
mechanical instrument. Mauss states, ?The body is man?s first and foremost natural instrument. 
Or more accurately? man?s first and most natural technical object, and at the same time his first 
 
45. Thomas Maupin, conversation with author, January 3, 2022. Thomas Maupin is a buckdancer from 
Murfreesboro, TN, and a 2017 NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) National Heritage Fellow. 
46. OneBeat brings musicians (ages 19?35) from around the world to a region of the US for one month each to 
collaboratively write, produce, and perform original music, and develop strategies for arts-based social engagement. 
OneBeat is a collaboration between Found Sound Nation and the US State Department. 
47. The Strathmore Artist-in-Residence Program is a flagship program of Strathmore?s Institute for Artistic and 
Professional Development. Every year, a class of six are chosen to benefit from the support of mentor musicians, 
professional development seminars, and extensive performance opportunities. 
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technical means, is his body.?48 In Mauss?s 1934 essay, he approached the body as if it were a 
machine by examining the techniques of the body according to human efficiency. Whereas tap 
dance scholar Constance Valis Hill described how Savion Glover uses his body as an instrument 
through visualizing,49 ?his tap shoe as a drum?the inside toe of the metal tap is a hi-hat, the 
outside toe the snare, the inside ball of the foot is the top tom-tom, the outside rim of the foot is 
the cymbals, his left heel is the bass drum, and the right heel the floor tom-tom.?50 The way 
Glover embodies instrumentation distills tonality and nuance in his footwork in the same way a 
musician would use their instrument. Mauss and Glover?s varying interpretations of the body as 
an instrument challenged me to ask myself, ?How do I use this instrument? How do I 
choreograph with the instrument of the body, as a musical instrument?? 
I generate choreography from a sonic foundation first. Sometimes it is a collaboration 
with a musician, music externally played out of a speaker, or a solo practice done a cappella. 
Ethnochoreologist Catherine Foley points out that percussive dancers merge sound and gesture 
into ?one within the dancer?s body, and although percussive dancers perform to and are inspired 
by music, they also make their own music.?51 Foley?s distinction here acknowledges that within 
percussive dance forms, the body uses gestures to create sound, to create music. That sonic 
intuitiveness expanded when I started playing clawhammer banjo. My musicality as a dancer 
shifted from a purely rhythmic design to merging melody and rhythm together to create one 
sound. Now when I create a choreography I consider, ?Where does the musical motif repeat? 
 
48. Marcel Mauss, ?Techniques of the Body,? in Incorporations, Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds. 
(New York: Zone, 1992), 461. 
49. Savion Glover is a revered rhythm tap dancer who became known for directing and choreographing Bring in 
?da Noise, Bring in ?da Funk, among others. 
50. Hill, ?Tap Dance in America,?15. 
51. Catharine Foley, ?Percussive Relations: An Exploration of Percussive Dance at Tr?th na gCos, 2002,? in 
Close to the Floor: Irish Dance from the Boreen to Broadway, eds. Mick Moloney, J'aime Morrison, and Colin 
Quigley (Madison, WI: Macater Press, 2009), 55. 
27  
   
 
What is a sibling musical phrase to this motif? Can I layer in other phrases, other time 
signatures? Is the dance offering texture to this tune or a melodic sensibility? Is the footwork at 
the same frequency of volume and tonality as the music being played? Am I dancing on the front 
edge of the beat or the back edge of the beat? What dynamics are being implemented?? Driven 
by these questions, I excavated my inclination towards melody to understand the ways in which 
melody can be translated through percussive dance movement. 
Listening to Flesh Speak 
A vibration can be the sound of bodies in tune ?S. Ahmed52 
I chose to start Lost Patterns with the vocalization of hums to teach the audience to listen 
to ?flesh speak.?53 Each individual?s utterances rippled through our bodies into the audience, 
resonating sound. The tone and timbre of an individual?s voice is identifiable, and yet the voice 
can seamlessly blend into harmonic unison with others. As stated by ethnomusicologists Feld 
and Fox, the voice is ?an embodied expression of social agency? a metaphor for difference, a 
key representational trope for identity, power, conflict, social position, and agency.?54 I wanted 
to introduce the individual as part of a larger community through the sound of voices 
interlocking and clashing, creating dissonance and harmony. Inspired by Pauline Oliveros? 
tuning meditation score, we hummed long notes, attuning to the other voices in the room before 
 
52. Sara Ahmed, ?Not in the Mood,? New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 82, (2014): 13?28. 
Project MUSE. https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/30966. 
53. Jade Power-Sotomayor, ?Corporeal Sounding: Listening to Bomba Dance, Listening to Puertorrique?xs,? 
Performance Matters 6, no. 2 (2021): 45, https://doi.org/10.7202/1075798ar. 
54. Alessandro Duranti, ed., A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, Blackwell Companions to Anthropology, 
vol.1 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 161. 
28  
   
 
homing in on the key of D minor.55 Each dancer entered the piece sonically before their bodies 
entered the stage to signal the significance of the body sounding to the audience. 
In the opening sequence of Lost Patterns, I was interested in transferring the melody of 
the tune from the clawhammer banjo to the voice to the footwork, holding all melodic knowledge 
within the body. In many percussive dance forms, there is a vocal tradition that mimics the 
melody. In Ireland and Scotland, it is called lilting, and ?involves improvising non-lexical 
vocables to dance tunes.?56 In tap dance this is called scatting, which is an improvisatory vocal 
styling used by musicians, dancers, and singers to emphasize the rhythmic complexities found 
within jazz. In both tap and flatfooting, it is common for dancers to sing the rhythms of steps as a 
memorization and pedagogical tactic. Embracing this shared technique, I had the cast use non 
lexical vocables of ba da de dum to convey the melody of ?Boll Weevil,? and to provide music 
generated solely from the body for each dancer to improvise to. 
 
55. Pauline Oliveros was a composer, accordionist, and a central figure in the development of post-war 
experimental and electronic music. 
56. Catherine Mullins, ?Blah, Blah, Blah: Making Sense of Nonsense in Irish Vocal Music,? Musical Offerings 
5, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 87?117, https://core.ac.uk/reader/25545700. Non-Lexical vocables are nonsense syllables used 
in a wide variety of music.  
29  
   
 
 
Figure 5: Opening to Lost Patterns. 
Becky Hill dances solo on a step-a-tune. Projections and Set Design by Andr?s Poch, 
Lighting Design by Heather Reynolds, and Costume Design by Becca Janney. 
Photo by Jonathan Hsu. 
I entered the stage during the humming section and made my way to a small step-a-tune 
centered on stage. The step-a-tune is at the rhythmic heart of old-time music. Flatfoot dancers 
carry these boards throughout festivals, setting them down at impromptu jam sessions. Often one 
step-a-tune is used for multiple dancers to take turns improvising to the driving momentum of a 
string band tune. The exchange is often a playful one, and I've learned many lessons on 
musicality, rhythm, and expression by trading steps on these small boards. Alone on the board, I 
felt as if I was calling out to others, mentors who have passed on, friends I haven?t seen for years 
due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the musicians and dancers who I never met but whose 
sounds live within my body. As I explored the sonic possibility of the step-a-tune, the footwork 
was simple, slow, segmented, and grounded. I shifted my weight slowly, transferring from a 
listening attunement to creating an audible sound. Moments passed before my call was answered 
by Erik Spangler?a musician in the cast?clapping a simple syncopated rhythm, followed by 
3 0 
   
 
the rest of the cast trickling into the physical space one by one. They entered as individuals with 
splashes of improvisation, establishing a conversation that grew as each dancer took a turn 
improvising on the step-a-tune. Within vernacular dance traditions, being conversational is 
valued; it keeps vernacular dance forms social, and it's the place where you can bring your 
questions with you. It is the place where you reveal who you are and ask, ?What do you think 
about this?? Being conversational requires listening and acknowledging what has been said prior 
to offering a response. 
Melodic Replication 
 In a duet with Roxy King, we replicated, transcribed, and transferred the melodic 
structure of the traditional Appalachian tune ?Falls of Richmond? into choreography that 
combined both flatfooting and tap vocabulary. There are many variations and renditions of ?Falls 
of Richmond,? as the tune has circulated through the old-time music scene for generations. I 
found myself most intrigued by the unusual clawhammer banjo stylings of Dwight Diller, an 
outsider artist from Pocahontas County, West Virginia, in his version of the tune. In Appalachian 
old-time music, the clawhammer banjo and flatfooting share similar musical roles, both 
manipulating rhythm and melody, within a jam session. This interchangeability provided us with 
innumerable ways to approach and problem-solve replicating the melody within the footwork in 
Lost Patterns. 
Through a deliberate process, we slowed down the music and replayed segments over and 
over again. King and I were able to transfer the musical phrases, structure, rhythmic sequencing, 
variations, and timbre of Diller?s banjo playing into footwork. I call this translation process 
melodic replication. Through this process, we were able to intimately know the idiosyncrasies of 
31  
   
 
Diller?s banjo playing, causing his musical presence to become a third collaborator, and igniting 
a conversation between the archival source material we were replicating and our dancing. As a 
flatfoot dancer, I often learn tunes on the fly at impromptu jam sessions. By the second repetition 
of the tune, I can replicate several of the variations and melodic accents, but I rarely get to 
intimately learn a tune and all of the variations it holds. Melodic replication provided a structure 
that forced me to excavate flatfooting?s ability to accent a melody and duplicate the structures 
inherent in old-time tunes. 
Appalachian old-time tunes embrace a repetitive structure, most commonly in an AABB 
combination in a 4/4 time signature. For a standard or straight tune within Appalachian old-time 
music, there are two parts, A and B. Each part consists of four bars, and often the four bars of the 
A-part are played twice (AA) for thirty-two counts or eight bars of music, followed by the B-part 
played twice (BB). The structure of ?Falls of Richmond? is not a straight old-time tune; it has 
four different parts, ABCD. Diller rearranged the structure to be played ABC / BABAB / ABC / 
BABA, eliminating the D part from the tune. Not every version of ?Falls of Richmond? shares 
this specific structure; this pattern is unique to Diller?s version. Intrigued by his sequencing, 
King and I followed his specific structure as a way to organize the footwork we generated. After 
listening to several other versions of ?Falls of Richmond,? we chose to create space to interject 
the forgotten D part into our choreography. The arrangement we settled on was ABC / BABA / 
DDD / A, transitioning directly into an improvisational solo from King that merged the sounds of 
banjo and tap dance. By mimicking the structures of this tune, we were able to figure out where 
there was space for us to insert our own variations while staying loyal to the source material. 
When I started working on this choreography, I intended for the dance and music to play 
the same melody in unison, to train the audience to hear melody within the footwork. However, 
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we realized having three voices?clawhammer banjo and two percussive dancers?in unison, 
using the same melodic phrasing, was too much of one thing. After becoming fluent in the 
melody with our footwork, we felt an impulse to resist the replication, and began to layer 
rhythmic phrases over top of the melody by interjecting elements of contrapuntal canon. To 
disrupt and highlight the trance-like state of the tune, we employed unison, call-and-response, 
and improvisational solos. These interruptions kept the choreography conversational, which was 
a tone we wanted to preserve throughout the piece. 
Unsure of how to arrange the music, we sent a recording of just our footwork at 84 bpm 
to Daniel Coolik, multi-instrumentalist and cast member, and asked him to compose a tune to the 
melody he heard within the footwork. I was curious about what would happen when a dancer 
transposes the melody of a traditional tune and teaches it to a musician without the musician ever 
hearing the source material. This game of sonic telephone was an experiment that didn?t lead us 
to the results we were hoping for. The music composed on fiddle didn?t replicate the feeling of 
the original tune. It almost had a circus-like vaudevillian sensation, while the original tune, 
?Falls of Richmond,? was a somber solo banjo tune. In this process, we learned that footwork 
has limitations on how it can replicate melody. Footwork can reference the rhythmic sequencing 
in melody, but it does not have the same access to tonality that other instruments do. Tonality 
evokes mood and emotion in ways that a purely rhythmic instrument cannot fully duplicate. 
Therefore, we went back to the drawing board and tried the dance a cappella to a metronome, 
and something finally felt right. In the end, we chose to eliminate both the original banjo tune of 
?Falls of Richmond? and Coolik?s original composition, to create space for the choreography to 
interpret the melody on its own. We settled on having the banjo provide a repetitious drone-like 
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groove that slowly became more intricate throughout the piece, to support the melodic 
sequencing within the footwork. 
This choreography asked the dance to serve as the lead musician, challenging the 
audience to see and hear sonic intricacies within footwork. Or as bomba dance scholar Jade 
Power-Sotomayor described, the dancers were ?seen and heard, claiming space and sound, 
occupying time and place, listening to find the rhythmic gaps into which flesh can be sonically 
inserted.?57 Within the ?Falls of Richmond? choreography, King and I claimed space and sound, 
guiding the ear to listen as we explored the body?s ability to create music. I was curious if the 
dance on its own could pull the audience through the process of listening and identifying the 
footwork as the main melodic instrumentation without the banjo reinforcing the melody. This 
choreography tested our ability to ?dance the tune,? and caused us to ask if footwork alone can 
hold the melody.58 
 
57. Power-Sotomayor, ?Corporeal Sounding,? 43?59. 
58. Percussive dancer Nic Gareiss coined the phrase ?dance the tune.? Dancing the tune is a celebrated skill 
within Appalachian dance traditions. 
3 4 
   
 
 
Figure 6: ?Falls of Richmond.? 
Performers: Roxy King, Daniel Coolik, and Becky Hill. Projections and Set Design by Andr?s Poch, 
Lighting Design by Heather Reynolds, and Costume Design by Becca Janney. 
Photo by Jonathan Hsu. 
Embodied Glitches 
To deepen my exploration into melody as a choreographic prompt, I revisited a solo I had 
created in 2017 to ?Elk River Blues,? and translated it into a trio. ?Elk River Blues? has lingered 
in my head for years. It is a haunting, slow, crooked, hyper-regional tune composed by West 
Virginia fiddler Ernie Carpenter. There is something entirely human about the way Carpenter 
bends the melody that distills heartache and depicts the sensation of what it is like to live in a 
rural mountain landscape where extractive industries prevail. Greta VanDoren taught me ?Elk 
River Blues? on the front steps of her house after I had spent years humming the melody to 
myself. We sat across from each other, and I observed how her fingers hit the notes, unfolding 
the melody. We only had one banjo, so we traded back and forth, and I remember noticing the 
way her body shifted with each curve of the tune. I was not studying a written piece of music, 
but learning through listening and observing her physical response, and the sound her physicality 
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emanated. In performance, I started ?Elk River Blues? solo, playing clawhammer banjo to 
highlight the partner dance that musicians share between themselves, their instrument, and the 
sounds they produce. The audience was asked to witness the way my body shifted weight and 
responded to playing this intricate tune on banjo, mirroring the way I learned the tune through 
oral transmission. 
In the process of resetting this choreography, I asked the dancers to trade eight, four, and 
two counts while following the structure of ?Elk River Blues.? This trading section illuminated 
how the tune momentarily shifted to 2/4 meter. I witnessed how the dancers? bodies glitched as 
they fought to stay true to the counts while simultaneously following the melody line. In 
response to those glitches, I broke down the tune to the specific counts, which consisted of four 
five-bar phrases in 4/4 meter, with the third bar of each phrase switching to 2/4 meter. When the 
dancers followed the structure of the tune without feeling the tune, I noticed how staccato their 
movements became. They were replicating the melody line with exact precision, and though 
perfectly in sync with the music, they had lost the legato feel of the original fiddle tune. As we 
continued to rehearse, the dancers began to hear, learn, and absorb the sensation and sounds of 
the tune. 
Through repetition, the dancers were able to release the precision they had been holding 
onto so tightly and stretch the spaces between the notes to embrace the emotional sensation of 
the tune. Having live music present throughout this process helped, because the bodies on stage 
could feel the vibrations of the notes ripple between them, as opposed to hearing the music 
externally from a speaker. During the performance, Coolik on electric guitar, and I on banjo, 
stood across from each other to establish the boundaries of the space. This staging allowed the 
music to coalesce in the center of the stage where the dancing occurred, washing over the trio as 
36  
   
 
they performed. By playing clawhammer banjo for this piece, I was able to simultaneously be 
inside and outside of the dance, tracking the dynamics of the work. Revisiting this choreography 
caused me to identify and name the space present within the tune. ?Elk River Blues? was more 
than a set of notes one could replicate with exact precision; the tune had a sense of breath 
throughout, and when we tried to purely replicate the melody without a connection to the 
emotionality of the tune, we lost what made the music genuine. 
 
Figure 7: ?Elk River Blues? 
Performers: Daniel Coolik, Tiffany Ospino, Ashton Frech, Paetyn Lewis and Becky Hill. Projections and Set Design 
by Andr?s Poch, Lighting Design by Heather Reynolds, and Costume Design by Becca Janney. 
Photo by Jonathan Hsu. 
  
3 7 
   
 
Chapter 5: Improvisation 
Learning to Listen 
When I arrive on stage, I am listening and expanding to the whole of the space/time 
continuum of perceptible sound. I have no preconceived ideas. What I perceive as the 
continuum of sound and energy takes my attention and informs what I play. What I play 
is recognized consciously by me slightly (milliseconds) after I have played any sound. 
This altered state of consciousness in performance is exhilarating and inspiring. The 
music comes through as if I have nothing to do with it but allows it to emerge through my 
instrument and my voice. ?Pauline Oliveros59 
I find delight in the sonic and physical possibilities my body holds, especially when that 
conversation is an impromptu musical dialogue between musician and dancer or dancers. As an 
improviser, I take cues from listening to the subtle shifts in the way each of my collaborators 
negotiate their gaze, weight, and breath. I examine the way musicians?or in the words of 
percussive dancer Nic Gareiss, ?dancers who hold things??interact with their fiddle bow to 
create music, or how the clawhammer banjo player articulates a boom-diddy rhythm using their 
fingers to pluck strings, or how another dancer initiates weight shifts. From this attuned 
awareness of the physical, and the sonic resonance that emanates as a result of the physical, I 
have developed a deep listening practice that drops me into the present moment. 
Being hyper attentive to the physicality of my collaborator, and to the sound they are 
generating, asks me to zone into the groove. That focus ignites questions only my instincts can 
answer. As a percussive dancer, I am embodying a constant heightened awareness of the sound 
my own footwork emanates as it negotiates between gesture and sonic resonance, all while in 
 
59. Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice (self-pub., Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005), 12. 
 
 
38  
   
 
conversation with my collaborator. ?What if I translate the bowing pattern of the fiddle player 
with my body? Can I try on the way the musician is interpreting rhythm in their bodies? How 
does their interpretation of rhythm interact with my own interpretation of rhythm? How can I 
catch the irregular phrasing pattern of the tune the musician is playing and accent it in the present 
moment?? 
When I improvise, my body which holds years of knowledge takes the lead. While 
improvising, my brain is acutely occupied in listening, translating what I am hearing, and 
anticipating the next moment synchronously, all while remaining in conversation with the music. 
This deep listening supports and invites my collaborators to arrive fully into the moment of 
improvisation with me. There is a spark that happens when I am able to interlock with dancers 
and musicians that is only accessible when I am improvising. Therefore, while building 
choreography for Lost Patterns, I wanted to craft the work in a way that invited improvisational 
sparks to occur. 
Improvography 
For the dancing exchange to be successful it requires acute attention and listening, the 
reading of cues, and the simultaneous appeal to kinesthetic intuition and memory while 
remaining aware of one?s place within the greater musical exchange. 
?Jade Power-Sotomayor60 
Maggie Laszewski, a second year MFA dance candidate, and I spent six months delving 
into improvisation as practice. We created and implemented improvisational scores that tested 
 
60. Power-Sotomayor, ?Corporeal Sounding,? 47. This quote is in reference to Puerto Rican Bomba dancing, 
however this acute attention to detail during improvisation is inherent in all vernacular percussive dance forms 
influenced by the African diaspora, and it is present within our improvography score. 
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our physical instincts. We held space to ?come as you are,? as stated by Kendra Portier.61 
Laughter, tears, and frustration were invited into our weekly ritual of showing up for each other 
and for ourselves. Improvisation for each of us was and is sacred because it is where our 
authentic selves surface, and where we are challenged to continually confront the present. 
Fueled by curiosity, we started a weekly improvisational practice that excavated the 
spaces where postmodern and percussive dance intersect. In every session, we would expand and 
develop a score together for that day, digging deeper into the physical research each time, and 
adding or subtracting from the score of the previous week. We began every rehearsal with a call-
and-response score in front of the same two windows in the choreography studio. It became a 
ritual that invited us to tune into what the other was bringing to the improvisation on that 
particular day. We layered in rhythmic complexities, we removed rhythmic complexities, we 
embodied variations, and rearranged sequences. The vibrations of those movements and 
experiences remained in our bodies, and the process of questioning trained us to translate our 
negotiation with space, each other, and live music in real-time. 
This weekly improvisational research began from a desire to find connections across 
differing dance forms. However, it expanded into a deep listening practice that trained us to 
attune to one another. The ?Nine Pin Willow? improvisational score we developed created the 
structure for us to drop into a deep listening practice quickly, while challenging our habitual 
patterns, and embodying decisions in real-time. The final score for ?Nine Pin Willow? involved: 
1. A specific version of ?Willow Weep for Me,? a popular jazz standard that Daniel 
Coolik arranged on electric guitar. This unique arrangement involved 
reharmonizing the first four bars of the A-part to create a bass line groove. The 
structure of the tune consisted of an AABA pattern repeated twice with a vamp on 
the musical motif to end. 
 
61. During Kendra Portier?s modern technique classes at University of Maryland, Portier often used a ?come as 
you are? improvisation score to warm up dancers. Kendra Portier is the Maya Brin Endowed Assistant Professor in 
Dance at University of Maryland. 
40  
   
 
2. A sound sample of square dance caller Lou Maiuri calling and teaching the ?Nine Pin 
Reel,? an Appalachian square dance.62  
3. A floor pattern extracted from an early 1900s hybrid quilt pattern entitled ?Missouri?s 
Puzzle.?63 
4. A call-and-response section where we traded phrases, each responding to how the 
other interpreted the music. 
5. An intro and outro that consisted of manipulating three rhythmic patterns that cycled 
over one bar of music: 1&a2&a hold, hold; hold 2&a3&a hold; and 1&a hold, 
hold 4&a. 
6. The task to drop into unison moments of stillness. 
This score served as a guidepost for our original duet and was developed over a semester of 
investigations. Discomfort occurred, we had moments where the score felt stale and disconnected 
before it felt invigorated, and the creative process was rife with insight. The ?Nine Pin Willow? 
score examined the translation process in real-time and revealed how those translations are 
passed on to others. 
In December 2021, Laszewski had to step down from her involvement in my thesis due to 
health issues. When that occurred, I chose to translate the original score we had developed from 
a duet to a full cast piece. I was curious how the cast would negotiate the freedom to make 
different choices each rehearsal and performance. Translating this score to a larger ensemble 
work felt like an opportunity to empower dancers? agency by providing them a structure to 
experiment within. I kept everything from the original score Laszewski and I had created, while 
developing moments of choreography as a foundation throughout. Within tap dance traditions, 
this is called improvography, which means a combination of choreography and improvisation.64 
The choreography sections were collaboratively generated by the cast through prompts given in 
 
62. The ?Nine Pin Reel? is a popular Appalachian square dance done in a four-couple set with one person in the 
middle. I was exposed to this dance by square dance caller Lou Maiuri of Summersville, West Virginia. 
63. ?The Quilt Index,? The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University, 
accessed June 2, 2021, https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=19-15-1456.The quilt pattern was based on a 
handmade quilt, ?Missouri?s Puzzle,? made from 1901?1929 by Agnes Dowell Umpleby in Pana, Illinois. 
64. Gregory Hines, ?Why?The Creative Process: Improvography,? Joy2Learn Foundation, Dancing with 
Gregory Hines, YouTube video, modified September 4, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFvhwCjTuGk. 
Improvography is a term coined by the late Gregory Hines, tap dance master. 
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rehearsal, and the spatial design was generated by replicating the geometric pattern of the 
?Missouri?s Puzzle,? an early 1900s hybrid quilt pattern. 
The revised ?Nine Pin Willow? score began with dancers entering the stage on a cross-
diagonal line, in duets that experimented with disrupting verticality. There was an ease, 
playfulness, and intention shared, as if the pairs were sharing a walk in the woods. The steps 
were an improvisational dialogue shared between two, and the choices and variations each 
dancer performed propelled the evolution of the dance through each performance. Each duet was 
assigned a different rhythm for the duration of one bar of music that looped continuously as they 
crossed the stage.65 Assigning each duet different musical accents within one bar provided a 
sonic framework for improvisation that prevented cacophony. These improvisations asked the 
dancers to respond and build upon the music and each other through attentive full body listening, 
while maintaining a connection to the rhythmic pulse of the music. The score asked each dancer 
to enter the piece ready to access years of dance training on the fly, inviting multiple translations 
to co-exist, and overlap in the same space concurrently. 
 
65. The rhythmic patterns were _ 2&a3&a_, 1&a2&a_ _ ; and 1&a_ _ 4&a. 
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Figure 8: ?Nine Pin Willow.? 
Performers: Gerson Lanza, Tiffany Ospino, Erik Spangler, Daniel Coolik, Ashton Frech, and Roxy King. 
Projection and Set Design by Andr?s Poch, Lighting Design by Heather Reynolds, and Costume Design by 
Becca Janney. Photo by Jonathan Hsu. 
 
 
Figure 9: ?Missouri's Puzzle.?  
A Hybrid quilt pattern by Agnes Dowell Umpleby from 1901?1929 in Pana, Illinois, found on the quilt 
index. This pattern was used as inspiration for the floor pattern in ?Nine Pin Willow.? 
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The center of the stage became the site of a cypher where each duet exchanged 
footwork.66 A cypher is a sacred space within many social dance traditions where dancers hold a 
circle for individuals to improvise. While each of these center stage duet cyphers occurred, there 
were multiple crossings upstage by dancers and musicians, creating a layered effect of 
foreground and background reminiscent of the whirling activity of a busy dance hall. I wanted 
this choreography to evoke a social dance without replicating any individual tradition. There was 
a section that imitated a square dance, a grapevine pattern that echoed a line dance, and an 
entrance which sampled remnants of bachata partner work. In this piece, we tried to honor and 
feature each dancer?s lineage. To create the communal sensation, it felt necessary to have the 
musicians move throughout the work with us, disrupting the separation between the roles of 
dancer and musician. Often, the musician stands outside the movement, and in ?Nine Pin 
Willow,? I wanted them to be within the movement, navigating the same score as the dancers, to 
reflect the inseparability of music and dance in vernacular practices. 
 If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught me anything, it is to pivot, and to let that pivot 
fuel curiosity. Translating the original ?Nine Pin Willow? duet into a larger ensemble piece 
cemented the cast together. I didn?t realize how essential it would be to create a communal space 
where the entire cast was in dialogue together until I witnessed how this piece transformed the 
energy of the ensemble and as a result the entire work. As a way of building a sense of 
community within our cast, we started almost every rehearsal with an improvisation cypher that 
involved both musicians and dancers. We would practice different approaches to improvisation, 
including call-and-response, matching or supporting, and countering or responding. Often, we 
 
66. A cypher is a freestyle dance jam where an open circle is created, and people take turns dancing in the center. 
The cypher has deep, long-standing cultural roots in dance forms influenced by the African Diaspora. Cyphers are 
prevalent in hip-hop, tap, flatfooting many other dance forms. I first learned the term cypher from dance scholar, 
Emily Oleson.  
44  
   
 
concluded our improvisational cypher with a short verbal reflection that discussed how the 
practice felt in our bodies on that particular day. This reflection is where I learned that as a 
musician, Spangler felt supported and heard when dancers left space for the music to respond, 
and where Ospino shared that using less footwork vocabulary empowered her choice making. 
The warm-up cypher became a place for candid exchange, both verbally and physically, and 
invited the dancers to truly come as they are while advancing their improvisational practice. 
I started working on improvisational scores with Laszewski to understand where the 
intersection points existed when different dance mediums merged. I wanted to discover ways of 
conversing physically that invited myself and others to drop into a flow state, where the mind 
and body become fully immersed in the present moment. By translating these improvisational 
duet scores to a larger ensemble, it invited exploration to occur on a more generative level. Using 
these scores as the foundation allowed us to create a large ensemble work within a short time 
period, and it asked us to enter the performance each night with a spark of the unknown. This 
improvography welcomed the knowledge each individual dancer held, and it taught us all to trust 
the physical intelligence of our bodies while creating room for instinct to initiate movement. 
Personally, I was able to recognize when improvising I truly get out of my own way and can 
enter an altered state of consciousness shared with another person or persons. To me, that is the 
most exhilarating place from which to dance; it truly invites the body to do the translating. 
Tilt of the Head 
Part of it was inevitable: steps just come out different on different dancers. Much of the 
change was willed, dancers striving to stand out, to express their individuality through 
the tradition. ?Brian Seibert67 
 
67. Seibert, What the Eye Hears, 24. 
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Within a trio between King, Lanza, and myself, I used improvisation to capture the ?tilt 
of the head??or crookedness?prevalent within the tune ?Greek Melody.?68 I first learned 
?Greek Melody? from clawhammer banjo player Kevin Chesser, who picked it up from playing 
back-up guitar for fiddler Andy FitzGibbon, who learned it from a recording of Kentucky fiddler 
George Lee Hawkins, who learned it from someone else who learned it from?. The cyclical 
nature of exchange is pervasive within folk traditions. I share this context because each person 
who learned the tune slipped in their own subtle variations along the way. ?Tunes will always be 
musical sound?the only constant characteristic they carry through time and space. And that 
sound is always changing. It leaves a fiddler?s mind, is physically interpreted through the fingers, 
transfers to vibration and resonance through the magic of a fiddle, and finally is processed 
through another human mind,? stated Appalachian folklorist and old-time musician Gerald 
Milnes.69 What Milnes is highlighting here is that creative expression is omnipresent in 
Appalachian folk traditions, which causes traditions to constantly evolve as they are transmitted 
to others. Chesser learned the tune through playing back-up guitar and told me in an informal 
conversation that learning the tune was ?pretty straightforward except the long notes at the end 
of each part.? Chesser then translated the melody onto clawhammer banjo through ?internalizing 
the tune? when playing rhythm guitar behind it.70 Chesser had memorized the melody so 
concretely through embodying the tune?s intricacies on guitar that he didn?t even notice the 
crooked pattern of the tune?s melody. In this instance, the musical instrument?the guitar?
 
68. Edwina Guckian, ?Interview with Colin Dunne,? Dance on the Box Lecture Series, Day 4, Leitrim Dance 
Festival, 2021. Irish step dancer Colin Dunne describes crooked tunes as a ?tilt of the head? when embodying 
Tommy Potts? music in Dunne?s solo show Out of Time. 
69. Gerald Milnes, Play of a Fiddle: Traditional Music, Dance, and Folklore in West Virginia (Lexington: 
University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 17?18. 
70. Kevin Chesser, conversation with author, February 8. 2022. 
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served as an extension of the musician?s body, highlighting once again that music is a result of 
embodiment. 
A standard old-time tune usually has sixteen counts in an A-part, which is repeated two 
times (AA) for a total of thirty-two counts, followed by a thirty-two count B-part played twice 
(BB). ?Greek Melody? is unusual because each part has seventeen counts made up of eight 
counts followed by nine counts throughout the tune. This makes each section (AA or BB) thirty-
four counts, with the extra count occurring at the end of each part. By improvising the tune with 
Chesser as part of our repertoire with the T-Mart Rounders String Band, I was able to understand 
the tune?s twists and turns through repetitive embodiment.71 I learned the tune through feeling it 
out and following the melody. I listened to both Chesser?s sound and his physical response as he 
played the tune. His foot would tap the downbeat on the melody, then pause on the extra note, 
and then tap again on the downbeat of the next phrase. His body signaled to me that something 
unexpected existed within the tune. 
When I began to develop material for my thesis, I knew I wanted to create a 
choreography which replicated the eccentricity of ?Greek Melody.? Intrigued by the idea of 
translation, I asked Coolik if he could learn it on electric guitar. He picked up the irregularity of 
the tune through a recording of Chesser on clawhammer banjo. Coolik stated, ?I didn?t count it 
out. It?s one breath phrase that repeats.?72 Neither Chesser, Coolik, nor I heard the unusual 
phrasing of the tune because we embodied it physically and sonically through repetition. We all 
leaned in and followed the tune?s melody?Chesser and Coolik embodied it on their instruments, 
and I in my footwork. It wasn?t until I went into the studio with King and began to work on 
 
71. The T-Mart Rounders are an Appalachian old-time music trio in which I perform alongside Kevin Chesser 
and Jesse Milnes. 
72. Daniel Coolik, conversation with author, February 10, 2022. Coolik is a multi-instrumentalist and Lost 
Patterns cast member. 
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developing set choreography that I realized the unusual eight-count / nine-count patterning 
throughout the tune. 
Folk music and dance traditions are passed down through oral transmission where 
unusual metering and phrasing can occur in the translation process, which is what happened with 
?Greek Melody.? When I played the tune for King, she asked, ?What is going on with this tune?? 
I remember thinking ?I don?t know what you?re talking about,? so we sat on the floor of the 
dance studio and counted it out. That is when it occurred to me that the tune wasn?t straight, and 
that the crookedness repeated as a pattern. King and I knew instantly that we wanted the 
audience to hear what we heard in the tune. However, the reality of the audience sitting there 
counting out the tune felt unrealistic. That is when the idea of interjecting moments of 
improvisation throughout the unison choreography surfaced, as a way of distilling the 
unexpectedness of the tune. 
By employing unpredictable improvisational solo lengths, ranging from three to 
seventeen counts, it kept both the dancers and audience engaged. We tossed solos back and forth 
throughout the arrangement of the choreography in ways that invited each dancer to express their 
own individuality while creating different translations of the music every time. I wanted to create 
a choreography that represented the bodies present on stage and the dance styles we represented. 
Therefore, Lanza and King each developed a tap dance phrase for the B-part of the tune. Lanza?s 
phrase was an eight-count phrase, and King?s was a nine-count phrase. To create my phrases, I 
extracted several segments from a recorded flatfooting improvisation I had done with Chesser to 
?Greek Melody? for the Swannanoa Gathering?s virtual concert performance in the summer of 
2021. King helped me translate the Swannanoa improvisations into choreographed sequences for 
the B-part. Together we generated two phrases of eight counts and two phrases of nine counts for 
48  
   
 
the A-part. The entire material for the five-minute choreography was generated from three B-part 
phrases and four A-part phrases with interjections of improvisation. The arrangement of this trio 
took five repeats through the tune, and it looked like a math equation. It was the most mentally 
rigorous choreography present within Lost Patterns, because it involved negotiating between 
unison moments that implemented a variety of canons, facing shifts, floor patterns, and splashes 
of improvisation at different durations, all while remaining interlocked with music. 
 
Figure 10: Becky Hill's choreography notes for ?Greek Melody? trio. 
49  
   
 
 
Figure 11: ?Greek Melody.? 
Performers: Roxy King, Becky Hill, and Gerson Lanza. Projections and Set Design by Andr?s Poch, Lighting 
Design by Heather Reynolds, and Costume Design by Becca Janney. Photo by Jonathan Hsu. 
 
Figure 12: Musicians Daniel Coolik and Erik Spangler during musical interlude prior to ?Greek Melody.? 
Projections and Set Design by Andr?s Poch, Lighting Design by Heather Reynolds, and Costume Design by Becca 
Janney. Photo by Jonathan Hsu. 
  
50  
   
 
Chapter 6: Sonic Abstraction 
Sampling an Embodied Archive 
Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present. ?T.S. Eliot73 
DJ / composer Erik Spangler and I worked with the materials of technology and 
percussive dance to access translation that collaged both live and archived sound. The 
progression of ?Step-a-Tune Soundweb? explored a spectrum of connections between movement 
and music, sonic abstraction, with specific sound samples from Appalachia and my particular 
embodied archive. The auditory element of my dancing was no longer solely linked to the sound 
it naturally generated, but rather through the interaction of dance and electronics, it created a 
translation that blended the past with present. Working with sound samples from my specific 
dance lineage allowed me to abstract my own history to understand it. Throughout the 
performance, both live and archived sounds co-existed and mingled within the same sonic space. 
Translating these traditions through sonic abstraction disrupted the telephone game process and 
allowed us to imagine and generate new possibilities. By performing this for an audience, they 
witnessed this abstraction while immediately archiving the live experience into their own bodies, 
and therefore were engaged in the translation process. 
The choreography for ?Step-a-Tune Soundweb? was performed on a step-a-tune with my 
percussive dance knowledge guiding the composition. A contact microphone was taped onto the 
board, and when I danced, my footwork triggered the timing of patterns from a customized 
 
73. Quoted in Cashman, Mould, and Shukla, The Individual and Tradition, 3. 
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analog modular synthesizer.74 Spangler used the synthesizer within live performance to play 
back and manipulate curated sound samples and shape tones generated by my footwork. 
Impulses from the amplified footwork sent triggers that clocked the sequencers within the 
modular system. The sequencers advanced through their patterns, dependent on the volume 
threshold and timing of my footwork, allowing me, as the dancer, to control the melodic 
movement in the piece. The way the modular system responded to the vibrations of the footwork 
changed every time, depending on the volume threshold setting used to generate the gate signals 
that drove the sequencers. This created an unpredictability that shaped the entire piece. The 
sequencer patterns controlled four different parts in the texture, providing a range of tones from 
field recording samples, an analog synth voice with variable timbre, and two harmonic 
resonators modeled on different physical materials. The field recording samples used throughout 
the piece referenced my old-time music and dance lineage. Those samples included the sound of 
Robert Dotson talking about flatfooting,75 the holler of Eileen Carson,76 the fiddle playing of 
Jesse Milnes,77 and the shuffling feet of Rhythm in Shoes Dance Company.78 The sound of the 
banjo?an instrument that since its origins has negotiated between tradition and innovation, 
anxiety and possibility, nostalgia and the present?helped guide ?Step-a-Tune Soundweb.? 
 
74. Jozef Ra?ek,?Modular Synthesizers?A Simple Explanation,? tBlog, September 2019, 
https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/modular-synthesizers-explained-simply/. Eurorack Customized Modular 
Synthesizer is an open-ended approach to synthesis in which different modules in a customizable system are 
interconnected using physical patch cables. A modular synthesizer is ?an electronic musical instrument that consists 
of a multitude of different components (modules) that are used and combined to create electronic sounds.?  
75. Robert Dotson was a tradition-bearer of flatfooting. His step, the Tennessee walking step, is the standardized 
flatfooting basic taught throughout the country and world. 
76. Eileen Carson was the Artistic Director of the Fiddle Puppet Dancers and Footworks Percussive Dance 
Ensemble. 
77. Jesse Milnes is a multi-instrumentalist and the lead vocalist for the T-Mart Rounders String Band. 
78. Rhythm in Shoes Dance Company was a percussive dance company directed by Sharon Leahy from 1987 to 
2010. 
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With these systems and sounds in mind, Spangler and I generated a compositional score 
consisting of seven sections that dictated the interchange between technology and dance.79 This 
score created a container that guided us through our exploration and dictated our roles within the 
collaboration. For my role as the dancer, those sections consisted of: 
1. Interact with the step-a-tune with hands and feet. Wait for the echo of sound to settle. 
Find moments of stillness and silence. 
2. Segmented footwork phrases, calling in the modular synthesizer. 
3. ?Green Corn? choreography AABB, AB80 
4. Sixteenth-note Thomas Maupin step while rotating into the freestyle flatfooting section 
at around 120bpm+. 
5. Decrease the tempo during drag backstep until complete stillness, drop to the ground 
and slowly rise. Enter sixteen counts after banjo loop begins.  
6. Share banjo loop conversation with Spangler on synthesizer and Coolik on fiddle. 
7. Return to segmented footwork phrases as hums from opener fade in to conclude the 
score. 
?Step-a-Tune Soundweb? took the audience on a vivid journey from silence to 
reverberated echoes, and into a fullness of subdivided footwork that caused a constellation of 
sounds. Spangler and I listened and responded to one another in real-time every evening, creating 
a conversation in dialogue with tradition but dependent on our attunement to each other in the 
present. Collaborating with a modular synthesizer and its unpredictability was a practice for me 
of embracing ephemerality and letting go of sonic precision. The modular synthesizer cannot 
replicate the same sonic result twice and is actively translating sounds in performance, which 
kept Spangler and I hyper focused, attuned, and ready to pivot at any moment. This hyper focus 
mirrors the trance-like state musicians and dancers feel in the midst of learning a fiddle tune on 
the fly at 130 bpm late at night at a festival. In these moments, it feels as if the outside world 
 
79. See Appendix: ?Step-a-Tune Soundweb? Compositional Score. 
80. ?Green Corn? is a tune from the late Harvey Sampson of Calhoun County, WV, and is part of the T-Mart 
Rounders String Band repertoire. 
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fades away, and it?s just you and the others you?re engaged with navigating how to drop into the 
music. 
This work was developed over a year of investigations, which involved many 
experiments, audio recordings, a performance at Strathmore, and multiple feedback sessions. 
Throughout our time in process together, Spangler and I were able to build something truly 
unique from a willingness to collaborate and experiment while remaining linked to Appalachian 
traditions. We bonded over a desire to explore the structures present within folk traditions. We 
disassembled those structures to discover where we could disrupt them, then reassembled them 
causing unpredictable adaptations to occur. Translating folk traditions through a process of sonic 
abstraction allowed us to question what music making can be when percussive dance interacts 
with technology. 
Spangler and I excavated our roles within the shared body / bodies of traditional 
Appalachian music and dance without being constrained by an adherence to tradition. This 
distance gave us space to abstract and invited us to examine our embodied archives. As my foot 
scraped, dug, and pulled shape into sound, I was able to reflect on my dance lineage. ?When I 
dance the archive, I feel as if I?m connected to something bigger. I am just one dancer in this 
Irish dance tradition, but I am a node connected to a network of movers,? stated dance scholar 
Kate Spanos.81 Through fragmenting sound samples from people I learned from, and who they 
learned from, and so on, I was able to interact with a network of traditional dancers and reflect 
on the ?passing it on? process I have been immersed in my entire life. 
 
81. Kate Spanos, ?Irish Dance on Repeat: Archiving the Dance and Dancing the Archive,? Our Steps Dialogue 
(blog), March 2022, https://www.our-steps.com/dialogue/irish-dance-on-repeat-archiving-the-dance-and-dancing-
the-archive. 
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The archive is a place where materials are preserved, and the body is a place that stores 
culture and traditions that reflect community. Ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski touched on 
this idea when he stated, ?There is no written or explicitly expressed code of laws, and their 
whole tradition, the whole structure of their society, are embodied in the most elusive of all 
materials; the human being.? 82 Performing ?Step-a-Tune Soundweb? live was a vulnerable 
experience; I was putting my archive on display for an audience. I wasn?t always emotionally 
prepared to hear what archived sound samples the modular would emanate, a few times the 
sound of my mentor?s voices being sampled would thrust me into a reflective place in the middle 
of performing. Negotiating between past and present caused my body to act as the primary 
conduit in which translation occurred. I was performing in the present, grappling with the past, 
all while asking questions about the possibilities the future holds. 
 
Figure 13: ?Step-a-Tune Soundweb.? 
Performers: Becky Hill and Erik Spangler. Projections and Set Design by Andr?s Poch, 
Lighting Design by Heather Reynolds, and Costume Design by Becca Janney. Photo by 
Jonathan Hsu. 
 
82. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in 
the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2014), 9. 
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Chapter 7: Design 
Even within what we call Appalachia, there?s diversity, there is an enormous amount of 
diversity just beginning with the shape of the land itself, and that shows up for me as a 
feeling of?the first feeling, is this sense of orientation and disorientation. ?Ben Nelson83 
As a way of entering the design process, I presented my design team; Heather Reynolds, 
(lighting), Becca Janney (costumes), and Andr?s Poch (projections and set) with artifacts that 
represented the landscape and culture of Appalachia. Establishing a sense of place felt vital to the 
world of this show because the landscape is an omnipresent force within the traditions I was 
extrapolating. Within Appalachia, the mountains are substantial; they impact daily life, ritual, 
industry, and culture with dichotomies prevalent throughout. The mountains are both insulated 
and exposed; awe-inspiring natural beauty and devastated strip-mined land exist within miles of 
each other; and vast chasms between wealth and poverty are ever present in day-to-day life. For 
Lost Patterns, the variations and contradictions present in the Appalachian landscape provided 
the designers with an entry point to explore translation in ways that welcomed ?orientation and 
disorientation? into the creative process. By placing the world of the show in Appalachia, I 
created a structure for my designers to explore translation in the show?s visual design just as I 
had in my choreography. This created a unified design concept for the show that connected the 
choreography, music, lighting, costumes, projections, and set design while welcoming 
experimentation into the process. 
Becca Janney, costume designer, found inspiration in the color palette of a mountaintop 
removal coal mine site, and used the colors to evoke the contradictions that exist between 
 
83. Ben Nelson, conversation with author, August 22, 2021. Ben Nelson is a second-generation old-time 
musician and outdoor education instructor. He shared these thoughts with me informally while discussing the 
landscape of Appalachia. 
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individual and industry present in the landscape. A unisex workwear aesthetic surfaced to 
acknowledge the rurality of Appalachia, and to reflect the musicians? and dancers? labor of 
holding rhythm. Mimicking the striations of the landscape, Janney incorporated unique patches 
for each costume, made from a crazy quilt pattern, that reinforced the design of the jumpsuits. 
The jumpsuits were made from hand-dyed linen, another nod to the rich cultural traditions of 
Appalachia. As I looked at performances by other percussive dance artists, I kept noticing that 
several current choreographers have chosen to emphasize individuality over a uniformed design. 
Janney and I were curious if we could do both. Could we give each cast member an individual 
look while connecting everyone to a unified aesthetic? Drawing on a handmade, hand-me-down 
feel, we were able to embrace individuality while visually creating costumes that were connected 
to the landscape, culture, and to one another. 
Figure 14: Color palette, landscape, and quilt pattern inspiration for costumes for Lost Patterns. 
Costumes designed by Becca Janney. 
5 7 
   
 
 
 
Figure 15: Final costume designs for Lost Patterns by Becca Janney. 
 
The architecture of the set was both practical and experimental. Knowing two musicians 
would be onstage for large portions of the show, the set designer Andr?s Poch and myself chose 
to embrace a cubism approach to distilling the mountains. Practically speaking, we needed a 
large table for Erik Spangler?s DJ equipment, and a stool for Daniel Coolik to sit on when 
playing electric guitar. We started with two cubes but discovered the geography of the set needed 
several more boxes to fulfill the cubism landscape. Throughout the set design process, Poch was 
attached to replicating a mountain vista using fabric. Therefore, we rotated through multiple 
designs until we settled on a design of nine fabric panels, each consisting of four squares, hung 
vertically in a semicircle to simulate the insulated sensation of a valley surrounded by mountains. 
The textural pattern painted on the panels consisted of a mountain landscape dissected into nine 
channels. When hung in order, the panels replicated the visage of the mountains. The painted 
textural pattern allowed the panels to respond to both projections and lighting in a way that 
generated a connectivity to the environment throughout the arc of the show. For the performance, 
we ended up removing two panels to shorten the transition time between Lost Patterns and 
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Tristan Koepke?s show Finally, Fairies! The loss of the two panels two days before the show, 
meant that the translation process within set design was active until the final dress rehearsal. 
 
Figure 16: Paint elevations for panels in Lost Patterns set design. 
Designed by Projection and Set Designer Andr?s Poch. 
 
 
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Figure 17: Projections and Set Design by Andr?s Poch, Lighting Design by Heather Reynolds. 
Photo by Jonathan Hsu. 
 
 
Figure 18: Set design research based on Polaroid emulsions for Lost Patterns by Andr?s Poch. 
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The projections and lighting guided the audience's interpretation of time, echoing the 
cyclical progression of the choreography. Blurring the lines between past and present was a 
theme that arose during this creative process. Lighting designer Heather Reynolds stated that she 
felt as if she was ?seeing history tangibly on bodies in space? after observing the ?Falls of 
Richmond? choreography for the first time.84 Navigating both the past and present 
simultaneously became a guiding principle that united the translation process throughout the 
whole show. Inspired by polaroid emulsions, we utilized layered effects within lighting and 
projections to consider Lost Patterns? relationship to time.85 As a collective, we began to ask, 
?What is the present? What is the past? What distills the sense of time when we are suspended 
within the trance of a tune or a hike in the woods? How can time be flexible and structured 
concurrently?? These inquiries helped us fragment the arc of the show into the timeline of a day. 
We mapped the show out, delegating which choreographies were sunrise, the heat of the day, 
sunset, and the glow of night. The lighting reinforced this timeline, utilizing dappled light during 
sunrise; a warm pink glow to manifest the energy of a square dance and to express the ecstatic 
joy of dancing in community; and a blue hue to capture the sensation of isolation one can feel 
when awake amid the night. 
Projections supported the emotionality of the show by creating a slow evolution that 
represented the passing of time. In an informal presentation within Adriane Fang?s Introduction 
to Dance course at University of Maryland Poch stated, 
 
84. Heather Reynolds, conversation with author, September 9, 2021. 
85. An emulsion lift or transfer is a process used to remove the photographic emulsion from an instant print by 
placing it in warm water. In this process, the emulsion can be transferred to other materials, interjecting variations 
and translations within photographs. The emulsion process is similar to my approach to developing choreography 
within Lost Patterns, by taking an original source material and translating it to unlock experimentation while 
remaining tethered to the source material. 
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I didn?t want to put up a mountain and call it a day. The piece was about translation / 
transmission, so what I did was I took a base image of Appalachia, then applied a layer of 
blurring, then a layer of displacement, then another layer of blurring again. This distilled 
the color, texture, and mood of the mountains but did not place us physically there. You 
see the mountains, you see the sky, but you don?t get the full information. I didn?t want to 
give it all away. 
By doing this, the audience was left responsible for interpreting the feelings and sensations of the 
projections, which invited them into a translation process. We decided that projections? role 
throughout the show should parallel Spangler?s soundscapes; this limitation helped guide the 
audience?s focus without distracting them with unnecessary information. During the most 
abstract part of the Lost Patterns, the ?Step-a-Tune Soundweb,? Poch removed projections from 
the panels to focus the audience on the intricacy of the footwork triggering a modular 
synthesizer. In response to witnessing the dance lead the score, Poch developed a floor projection 
that guided the audience?s focus to the footwork. Poch wanted the audience to understand that 
everything seen and heard on stage was being triggered by the footwork I was conducting. The 
result of this was an asymmetrical distorted ripple projection that started on the floor then slowly 
rose to the panels. This projection ebbed from the step-a-tune outward, creating ripples as if I 
was dancing in water. 
The designers? interpretations created an entry point into Appalachia composed of a 
collection of translations. By entering the work with a shared understanding of the landscape of 
the region, there was a consistency of place that grounded and connected the choreography and 
design. I learned an immense amount about trust in collaboration within this process. The 
designers and I worked from a place of ?yes, and.? We all took risks, we threw paint at the wall 
until something stuck, and the result was an evocative translation of the Appalachian Mountains 
and its culture. 
  
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Chapter 8: Conclusion 
You move together, you just have this rhythm together, you build something together, you 
play this music together that is so deep and ancient. ?Anna Harrod86 
As a percussive dance choreographic work in a postmodern affiliated dance program, 
Lost Patterns was an intervention, and an opportunity to build a percussive dance community at 
the University of Maryland that challenged and celebrated percussive dance in its entirety. As the 
work progressed through rehearsals and into performance, the questions, ?Why do I make art?? 
and ?Who is it for?? kept surfacing. What I realized is I create choreographic works to build 
community, to invite the audience into the conversation, and to celebrate humanity. 
As a choreographer within vernacular music and dance traditions, creating a sense of 
community on and off the stage is necessary to generate meaningful work. Collaborators need to 
feel welcomed to bring the whole of who they are into the creative process, and that takes time 
and trust. I have learned that if I can empower everyone?s individuality while finding places of 
commonality, then the work will make itself. In the words of Heather Reynolds, the lighting 
designer for Lost Patterns, ?You create a space in which people are safe and comfortable to be 
themselves, and in doing so, you elicit some the of their best possible work while maintaining a 
clarity of vision, precision, and expertise that allows you to shape the work best.?87 Building 
community takes effort, persistence, and commitment by all who are involved, and I feel 
fortunate that this cast chose to engage in a creative process that was more than just dance steps. 
 
86. Anna Harrod, conversation with author, January 3, 2022. Anna Harrod is a Kentucky native and second-
generation fiddle player. She shared these thoughts with me regarding why she plays old-time fiddle in an informal 
conversation. 
87. Heather Reynolds, note to author, March 13, 2022. Lighting designer Heather Reynolds shared this with me 
in a thank you card. 
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During the beginning stages of my choreographic investigations, we were in the midst of 
a COVID-19 pandemic, rehearsals were done in KN95 masks, and the Omicron surge was 
happening. Despite those constraints, my cast still showed up, however there was a distance 
created by the pandemic that echoed in the bodies present. After our second work-in-progress 
showing, the steps and music were there, but the camaraderie wasn?t. That?s when I asked 
myself, ?How had I managed to make a choreographic work rooted in vernacular dance 
traditions but left the communal aspect out of it?? The fatigue of the COVID-19 pandemic, along 
with scheduling and coursework, meant it took time for a cohesive community to solidify within 
Lost Patterns. It took sharing moments outside of rehearsal, outside of the walls of the Clarice 
Smith Performing Arts Center. It took laughter and the practice of improvising together in a 
cypher during every rehearsal and show. Through these interactions, we began to see each other 
and be seen, and this dynamic made the show accessible and conversational. 
The audience was able to witness the generosity and respect we had for each other, and 
the passion we shared for our art, which in turn invited them into the work. Henry McGrath, a 
current University of Maryland student, shared this response to Lost Patterns with me: 
Your performance very much respected the audience. The presented medium of dance 
was outside of the usual realm of experience of the audience but did not leave them lost 
in a world of artistic interpretations. What I mean by this, is that I, as the audience, have 
little experience seeing tap dancing. However, I was still anchored to the performance 
because I was familiar with the emotions being conveyed?. So, even when the 
performance did become artistically adventurous, it still remained true to the theme I 
could recognize, allowing me to relax and be able to enjoy this foreign expression of 
emotions.88 
By inviting the cast to share connectivity with each other, we were able to transcend the 
proscenium and instigate a shared experience that involved the audience. 
 
88. Henry McGrath is a student from the Introduction to American Social Dance course that I taught at 
University of Maryland, Spring Semester 2022. This is an informal reflection written in response to Lost Patterns 
that he submitted for extra credit. 
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The positive reception received for Lost Patterns by the audience and cast was 
overwhelming and is ultimately what will empower me to continue choreographing. I have 
learned through this process that it is impossible to please everyone, and there will always be 
someone eager to analyze why you made a particular artistic choice. If I can free myself from the 
fear of judgment and live, perform, and work in the present moment and in collaboration with 
community, then I have not only unlocked a creative process, but a way of living. This way of 
making invites others to show up in the present as well, and it asks the audience to slow down, 
causing them to sit at the edge of their seats or rise to a standing ovation. To me this is an 
ultimately self-sustaining artistic process because it invites and creates space for others. 
This thesis research is just the beginning. Lost Patterns is a show built through a 
collaborative process that reflects each individual's contributions, and the dance and music 
lineages they bring into the work. The same investigation into translation with a different cast 
would yield completely different choreographic results. Lost Patterns is a relational piece built 
out of conversation. Being in the creative process with others, united under a theme, is where I 
flourish. I delight in asking questions bigger than myself, that rely on collaboration to answer. I 
welcome questions as a way of making, as a way of living, and as a way of pushing traditions to 
places where innovation occurs. 
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Addendum 
Figure 19: Final moment of Lost Patterns. 
Performers: Paetyn Lewis, Ashton Frech, Roxy King, Daniel Coolik, Becky Hill, Erik Spangler, Gerson 
Lanza, and Tiffany Ospino. Projections and Set Design by Andr?s Poch, Lighting Design by Heather 
Reynolds, and Costume Design by Becca Janney. Photo by Jonathan Hsu. 
 
The Curtain Call 
The last gesture that occurred onstage during our performances of Lost Patterns was the 
curtain call. It was a moment where the entire cast stood in a line downstage, breaking the fourth 
wall with the audience. As a unified cast, we took two bows together, prior to Coolik playing 
?Lester Leaps In? on fiddle.89 As Coolik sounded the fiddle, the cast stepped into a semi-circle, 
the lighting shifted to evoke the warmth of a community hall, and the cast began to clap along to 
 
89. ?Lester Leaps In? is a standard swing tune written by Lester Young, member of the Count Basie Big Band. 
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the fiddling, guiding the audience to do the same. At that moment, the circle between performer 
and audience was complete. Each member of the cast stepped into the center of the circle and 
took a brief, playful, improvised solo and were seen for who they truly are. This curtain call 
cypher represented the creative process of building Lost Patterns because it validated everyone?s 
contributions. With that same sensibility, I wanted to welcome the voices of my collaborators 
into this written thesis.90 
Reflections from the Cast 
Reflection from Paetyn Lewis, dancer. 
This was a really different experience for me with tap. I?ve only ever done tap in a studio 
setting where we?re performing stylized choreography for an audience. Everyone has to 
look and sound the same. In this show Becky really stressed the importance of each 
performer really being themselves and wanted each individual to shine in the way they 
felt most comfortable. For me this really put me out of my comfort zone in relation to tap, 
but it was in a way that made me feel excitedly nervous and challenged. Secondly, 
because of the individuality of every performer, the show had an incredibly unique 
quality. Everyone?s different backgrounds with percussive dance put so many forms 
together in a way that I?ve never seen. In writing, it almost seems like it wouldn?t make 
sense, but it really made for a beautiful collection and celebration of percussive dance. 
Reflection from Ashton Frech, dancer: 
Improvising has always been something that has been difficult for me. So, when it came 
up that there would be improvisational moments in the show, I was nervous. In order to 
get us more comfortable with the idea, Becky would have the cast start each rehearsal 
with a cypher. At first, it was a bit rough for me. In improvisation I always felt like I had 
to pull out tricks to show off and I would quickly run out of ideas on what to do. 
However, as we tried different prompts and as time went on, I was able to get more 
comfortable in simply vibing with the music and the people around me. I learned how to 
let the steps flow out in conversation with the musicians by simplifying my moves and 
letting go of the idea of having to show off. Working on improvisation also helped me to 
find my own voice throughout the show in the moments that were choreographed. By the 
 
90. All reflections were shared with me informally following the performance of Lost Patterns in March 2022. 
These reflections are organized in the order in which they stood in line, from left to right, during the curtain call. 
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time show weekend came, I felt comfortable and confident in my ability to improvise in 
front of an audience. 
Reflection from Roxy King, dancer: 
Who would have thought the world of translations could be so fascinating? Coming from 
a tap dance background, I approached this project with tap dance in mind. Learning steps 
and being able to create or embellish music has been something I?ve always known. I 
didn?t initially realize just how translations require you to go much deeper than that. 
Being introduced to the idea of translating one musical culture through the vessel of 
another was wildly exciting for me. I found over the length of the process that translating 
requires you to really connect to how one understands music. For example, two people 
can hear a single phrase and yet create two very different steps based on tonal preference. 
The music we were deconstructing was foreign to me to say the least. One strum of the 
banjo and I was done. Over it. However, having to stick with it opened history for me.  
Through any music you can hear the history of the land, the instruments used, and of the 
people that played them. In alignment with that, it made me think about how it?s the same 
for tap dance. Every time we put on the shoes we are calling and honoring those that 
came before us. Turns out these two dance genres are not so foreign after all. The end 
collection of pieces truly was some of the most connected pieces I?ve ever had the 
pleasure to dance. All dancers and musicians were in conversation during the 
construction of said pieces which meant a small part of all of us were in there too. The 
amazing part about all of this is that when you hear or see any of these pieces, you too 
will now be a part of the community we created together. 
Reflection from Daniel Coolik, multi-instrumentalist: 
Throughout the show, there was a proper balance of improvisation and arrangement. I felt 
like we could communicate in the moment, and I could change musical phrasings to react 
to what the dancers were doing. Whether it be a rhythmic idea or a movement that caused 
me to decide to do something different. I felt as if we all could contribute ideas within the 
piece to have it flow. When Becky sent me the idea for ?Falls of Richmond? she just sent 
me an audio file of her and Roxy playing all the musical parts. We then went back and 
forth and had discussions about how to let the dance play the melody while I 
accompanied them, which is the reverse in the music world. It was very informative for 
me to think in a different way, and when we rehearsed, and I saw the movements with the 
music it all came together. 
Reflection from Erik Spangler, DJ and composer: 
The development of my role in the sonic design of Lost Patterns evolved in many 
unexpected ways, which have made it a joy to be collaborating with Becky. This began 
with a very specific exploration of ways that we could use a danceboard as a controller 
for electronically generated sounds. A collection of sound sources within a modular 
synthesizer patch are mixed live, all initiated by the kinetic impulses of Becky?s feet on 
the board. My role of coloring her steps with different melodic sequences, and 
combinations of electronic voices suggested a new mode of performance interaction, 
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which I came to think of as ?sonic spooning.? As our collaborative composition 
developed, it was enriched by incorporation of audio samples connected with Becky?s 
dance lineage, rhythmic patterns from the fiddle tune ?Green Corn.? Within the 
composition that came to define our central collaboration, ?Step-a-Tune Soundweb,? we 
were able to play with the unpredictable aspects of performing with a modular 
synthesizer, while also tightening and defining the shape of the work within the narrative 
framework of Lost Patterns. As the work developed through rehearsals, I enjoyed the 
process of opening from a one-on-one collaboration to a group dynamic, including 
moving further into group composition with multi-instrumentalist Daniel Coolik. I was 
able to grow in other ways as a performer by Becky?s invitation to participate as a mover 
alongside the dance cast. This also helped to shape my understanding of the larger story 
being told through Lost Patterns, how traditional dance and music forms may be 
transmitted and transformed through various layers of cultural influence. Working in a 
collaborative way on soundscapes throughout the show helped provide a wider and 
deeper meaning to the abstract explorations of movement and sound in ?Step-a-Tune 
Soundweb.? I especially enjoyed our development of humming and voices generally as a 
thematic element, to mark the beginning, middle, and ending stages of the theatrical 
narrative. We also shared in the selection of field recordings which helped to shape a 
collective sense of place. 
Reflection from Gerson Lanza, dancer: 
Rebecca Hill's creative process of Lost Patterns built a unique framework that allowed 
dancers to bring their voices and creativity into the space. Within the realm of percussive 
dance, exists many diverse forms that use the body to reach a musical intent that 
resonates visually and audibly to outside participants. I am a tap dancer that enjoys a 
close connection with the floor, syncopation, and musical virtuosity. As a participant in 
this creative process, I felt supported in my offerings to Hill's thesis performance 
presentation. Lost Patterns had the representation of tap dance, flamenco, hoofing, 
Appalachian flat-footing, and sand dance. In Lost Patterns, all these percussive styles had 
a harmonic conversation that brought joy, community, and appreciation. 
Reflection from Tiffany Ospino, dancer: 
Having previous experience in percussive dance, I was thrilled at the fact that I was able 
to showcase a bit of my background, which I feel has been pushed to the side since 
coming into a Modern dance program. In a past performance at UMD, we had a violinist 
play while we performed; however, there wasn?t any interaction between the dancers and 
the musician. Becky?s piece allowed me to have moments of improvisation and 
interaction between the musicians. Not only did my solo improvisation change every 
night, but the way I played with the musician?s rhythm changed as well. I had genuine 
connections with the entire cast and you could see that shine on stage.  
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Appendix: ?Step-a-Tune Soundweb? Compositional Score 
Over the course of fourteen months, February 2021?March 2022, Erik Spangler and I 
developed a detailed composition for percussive dance and modular synthesizer entitled ?Step-a-
Tune Soundweb.? The original score debuted in August 2021 at Strathmore and evolved into this 
arrangement for Lost Patterns. This composition provides the technical and choreographic 
specifics utilized within "Step-a-Tune Soundweb" during the March 11?13, 2022, performances 
of Lost Patterns at University of Maryland College Park.
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Bibliography 
Ahmed, Sara. ?Not in the Mood,? New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 82 
(2014): 13?28. Project MUSE. 
American Tap Dance Foundation. ?International Tap Dance Hall of Fame, Biographies, John 
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