Date of Award
Summer 8-20-2025
Level of Access Assigned by Author
Open-Access Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Intermedia
First Committee Advisor
Susan Smith
Second Committee Member
Lindsey French
Third Committee Member
Laren Lynn
Additional Committee Members
Amy-Jane Mooney
Abstract
Immaterial: Hearing the Unseen - A Stage Without an Image: Tap Dance as Auditory Installation reframes tap dance as sound art by separating visual and auditory experience. This project explores what happens when the visible body is withheld and only the rhythmic trace remains. The audience is invited into a carefully constructed preparation space—complete with costumes, mirrors, and vanity—while the dance itself takes place off-site, its sounds transmitted into the gallery through technological mediation.
By relocating the performance and denying visual access to the dancer, the work challenges traditional expectations of dance and confronts the hierarchy of the senses in performance reception. The tap floor becomes a conceptual gesture: a portable stage that moves in and out of visibility, activating space through rhythm and disappearing to leave only resonance behind. In this way, tap becomes an ambient, spatial composition—an installation heard rather than seen.
Drawing on R. Murray Schafer’s soundscape and Pauline Oliveros’ deep listening, the work positions rhythms as an acoustic architecture, and listening as an interpretive act. The audience must engage without visual confirmation, tuning in to texture, variation, and resonance. What emerges is not a spectacle of virtuosity, but a choreography of attention.
Immaterial situates itself at the intersection of performance art, sound installation, and institutional critique—inviting reflection on how dance can live through mediation, how labor becomes legible through absence, and how shifting sensory focus transforms artistic experience.
Recommended Citation
Schaeffer, Vanessa J., "Immaterial: Hearing the Unseen — A Stage Without an Image: Tap Dance as Auditory Installation" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 4258.
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd/4258
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