Dance postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At the leisure centre where I work mornings on reception, the swipe gates make a short double beep for members and a long single tone for anyone whose card has expired. After two years I can tell from the rhythm of the queue whether the first aqua class has started on time. Noticing how ordinary movement organises itself in time and space has become the centre of my choreographic interest, and I am applying for postgraduate study in dance to develop it with more rigour than I can manage alone.

My undergraduate degree in dance gave me a broad grounding in contemporary technique, ballet, improvisation and dance history. I graduated with a 2:1. The modules I valued most were in composition and somatic practice. In the composition modules I learned to treat a phrase as material to be cut, repeated and reordered rather than as a finished object. My final project was a fifteen-minute trio built from the hand gestures of traders at the covered market near my flat. Over six Saturdays I sketched and filmed, with permission, the way stallholders weighed, wrapped and passed change. I then transcribed about forty gestures into a movement score. With two fellow students, I enlarged some of the gestures so that they travelled through the whole body. Others I slowed until they were barely recognisable. The piece was assessed well for its structure, but my tutor's most useful comment was that the second section relied on unison when the source material was full of overlapping, unsynchronised timing. That observation pushed me towards questions I still find absorbing: how far everyday movement can be abstracted before it loses its social meaning, and how a score can preserve the texture of real timing.

I have kept working since graduating. Two evenings a week I teach a beginners' tap class for adults at a community hall. Most of my students are in their fifties and sixties, and several come for exercise rather than performance. Teaching them has sharpened my own ear. I have learned to break a shuffle-ball-change into sounds before steps and to explain syncopation without jargon. Last spring the class performed a short routine at the hall's open day. I arranged it so that the most confident dancers carried the rhythm and newer members could join in sections. Seeing people who had never danced take a bow taught me that structure can be a form of generosity.

Alongside this I have read more widely than I did as an undergraduate. Rudolf Laban's effort categories of weight, time, space and flow have given me a practical vocabulary for describing the qualities I see in the market and the leisure centre. Yvonne Rainer's rejection of spectacle in her "No Manifesto" made me reconsider why I am drawn to pedestrian movement. It also made me ask whether my work risks romanticising labour rather than examining it. I would like to pursue these questions in a setting where practice and theory are tested against each other, with peers who will challenge my assumptions.

Outside dance, I keep an allotment with my flatmate. It has made me more patient with slow processes, and weeding is a surprisingly good time to work through a phrase in my head. My reception job has given me reliability, calm with the public and an organised approach to scheduling. These qualities helped me book rehearsal space and coordinate dancers for my final project.

At postgraduate level I hope to develop a body of choreographic work grounded in observed, everyday movement. I want to refine my methods for scoring and transcribing it and to think critically about the ethics of drawing on other people's gestures. I want my teaching experience to inform how I work with dancers of differing training. I am ready for the sustained studio time, critical feedback and research demands of advanced study.