Cariactureography

"Caricatureography moves character development in a new direction and offers a new way to train dancers. Audiences know the concept of love and will be able to relate." ~Marcus Hayes

I coined the term Caricatureography in the Spring of 2022 to name the following original theory I devised based on the hybridization of the terms caricature and choreography. How I employ the meaning of these terms to work in tandem establishes a new choreographic structure I’m developing as another pathway for narrative choreography. By prescencing the corporeal existence—physical manifestation—of iconic literary characters (acting as the creative artefact), caricatureography is the practice and performance of embodying these character’s representations via danced interpretations of their stories. Conceptually, Cariactureography is not based on the main plot of the book but instead based on the plot of the characters. The choreographer is taking the interpretive experiences of the readers engaging in the plot of the characters and associating movement with the meaning of their interpretations of that narrative. My approach to this concept elicits the interpreted experiences of the readers engaging in the character’s stories and then associates movement with the meaning of their interpretations. The purpose is to extract the characters narratives from the main plot to compose text in a different form. The purpose is to extract the characters narratives from the main plot to explore the nuances and many dimensions of subtext. Significantly, discovering how reading through observing dance changes our awareness of dance making as writing and transcribing, and expands the possibilities for understanding the unique relationship between dance and literacy. My current work explores, Toni Morrison’s characters the Breedloves in The Bluest Eye and Jadine and Son, in Tar Bar. What distinguishes my practice from other narrative works is that it moves away from presenting a literal representation of storytelling. For example, Christopher Wheeldon’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and Marius Petipa’s and Lev Ivanov’s “The Nutcracker” are full-length narrative ballets based on children’s stories and caricatureography is based solely on the narrative of literary characters rather than the entire literary work.