As a dancer, I know that emotion and movement have a reciprocal relationship. I've been dancing for more than half of my life, and while I've felt my mood change because of the choreography that I'm performing, I've also noticed instances when my feelings alter my movement. However, because the brain is so poorly understood in comparison to most other human organs, especially when it comes to complex subjective experiences such as emotion, the physiological nature of this relationship is very poorly understood. In this project, I will be investigating the reciprocal physiological relationship between movement and emotion in the human body. The first component of this project is primarily focused on writing a literature review. The existing relevant literature has covered so many otherwise disconnected areas of inquiry that tying them together in this foundation is crucial. The second part of the project is an exploration of applying my findings to movement. I will generate a series of improvisational scores, inspired and directed by my literature findings, that will aim to supplement the empirical with embodied research. The experience of dancing and observing these scores will be in dialogue with my scientific research to influence the direction and application of both. I'm expecting to find conscious and unconscious connections between emotion and memory in the association of bodily movements and states with mental states; however, I'm also expecting it to be difficult for a dancer to identify many of their associations because they are complex, multi-faceted, and not entirely conscious. The findings of this study can be used to make recommendations for future research by identifying areas of unknowns as well as inform how dance performers and teachers approach emotional investment onstage and in the classroom.

This solo dance work explores ways in which the male gaze inhibits women's lived sexual expression and identity. As a choreographer and dancer, I will be utilizing creative and embodied research to physically interrogate the portrayal of female bodies as visual and sexual objects. I draw stylistically on the work of modern choreographer Pina Bausch, specifically exploring the way her work displays societally-recognizable misogynistic gender roles and objectified female bodies on stage, then contrasting that with powerful and deeply emotional movement expression from the female dancer, showing that she is much more than the images society places on her, and these images stifle her identity, her freedom, and her truth. I also draw on the work of writer and art critic John Berger, primarily in his examination of the culture of voyeurism and exploitation of female bodies in classical nude paintings. I incorporate bodily shapes from these "nudes'' and also from contemporary advertisements, in both of which women's bodies are often sculpted and twisted out of realistic proportion in order to better suit the male viewer's fantasy, ultimately born of a male fear of rejection from the sexually empowered and autonomous woman. My embodiment of these images exposes the effort and exhaustion behind them. The visceral emotionality in this work comes from my desire to physically challenge these ideas within my own body, as I explore the ways in which I've internalized and performed these harmful notions of desirability and femininity in my daily life.