Dancer Mickie Geller sets up a video camera in a third-floor studio in Putnam Hall. Padding to a spot on the studio’s polished wooden floor, she begins to try out movements that have flitted through her head over the past few months. Geller will return again and again for the next few weeks, recording ideas for a dance she is creating.

Same studio, but different time, different dancer: Kim Neal Nofsinger sketches an entire piece in only two hours, drawing on a dictionary of movement he has compiled through a rigorous schedule of improvisational workouts. With the piece recorded in his mind, he’ll fine-tune it through weeks of intense rehearsals.

Though their methods are very different, these two choreographers in Ohio University’s School of Dance — Geller, a 20- year veteran of the program, and Nofsinger, a first-year faculty member — are tackling the same somber subject: death. Their means are as individual as they are, and yet each will create something that is at once unique and universal. And neither can tell you exactly how it happens.

Movement I: Adagio For Dad

In a dance studio glowing with spring sunlight and overhead fluorescent lights, Geller cues up the videotape she made in the summer of 2002. Other than the faint tinkle of a piano from elsewhere in the building, there is no music.

Video prepared, Geller settles on the floor by a wall of mirrors to watch her colleague Travis Gatling practice the dance she has choreographed. Both are clad in loose clothes, and the atmosphere in the studio is similarly comfortable. When Gatling falters in a series of complex arm movements and looks to her for guidance, Geller laughs. “You’re looking at me?”

To refresh their memories, they review videotape of Geller in the same studio, creating the movements Gatling now is learning. He repeats the segment and continues under Geller’s watchful gaze. Sometimes she moves in tandem with him. On the surface, the two couldn’t be more dissimilar — her graying pageboy, his extravagant dreadlocks — but their focus is equally intent. Geller stops him to correct or refine a movement, offering images to illustrate. Although the mood is light, the subject is not. The still-unnamed piece was inspired by a poetic coincidence: As her father wasted through his final illness, Geller’s barn deteriorated. “Little by little it collapsed until there was only one timber standing,” she recalls. “This piece is a metaphor about watching them collapse and cease to exist.”

A native New Yorker, Geller began dancing at age four and trained as a teenager at the Martha Graham Studio and at the Juilliard Preparatory Division, where she took composition classes with Pearl Lang, a member of Graham’s company. She danced in New York for 12 years before coming to Ohio in 1983.

Decades of dancing have built a vocabulary of movement she draws on for her work. But while movement is the basis of dance, Geller says other art forms are vital to her choreography. From painting and other visual arts, she learned how to arrange figures in space. Literature taught her about formal structure.

“For me, dance is a long-term quest: What, finally, is a dance form?” she says. “What is unique to dance that makes it different from literature, poetry, music? It has elements of all those things. It’s a visual art, a kinesthetic art, theatrical, musical — you have to know something about all those forms.”

The arts offer not only knowledge, but also inspiration. She created “Checkers,” a piece for two dancers, after reading about a New York play set in two theaters. While toying with the idea of a piece that uses a split stage, Geller was struck by its similarity to a board game such as checkers. A book on checkers strategies gave her ideas for movement, as well as snippets of text for the accompanying narration.

Other inspirations are less concrete. “Sometimes I have no idea, so I just walk into the studio and start moving to see what’s there,” she says. For the piece she’s been working on with Gatling, she started with a specific idea but needed to develop it further in the studio. She began playing with movements in the studio and videotaping her sessions. She doesn’t use a formal notation system. “I have a sense of what I’m doing in my mind’s eye,” she says. “But if I hadn’t videotaped it, it would be gone.”

By reviewing the videos, Geller began to build a dance out of random movement. Because she no longer performs — “I don’t get anything from it, and it’s harder to keep in the shape I need to be in with my schedule and my age,” she says — she approached Gatling, an assistant professor of dance with whom she’d never worked. “His style is the closest to the way I see the person moving in this piece,” she explains.

The marriage of styles deepens as Geller constantly adjusts the movements in rehearsal. Each session covers a small segment of the entire piece, so choreographer and dancer can focus and refine it.

“We don’t cover a lot of material at a time, but we really work out the specifics so by the time we leave, I feel really comfortable with it,” Gatling says.

After an hour of practice, he’s ready to run through the entire section from the beginning. The previously disjointed movements now convey debilitation as Gatling rolls, contorts, jerks, and flops like a mortally wounded animal trying to rise, denying the inevitable. Although the still-unnamed composition is about death, this segment is the beginning, not the end. Over the course of the entire piece, Gatling will gradually rise until the final movements are made standing.

“This is about healing myself,” Geller says, noting that by reversing the process, she recalls her father in health, not in sickness.

Movement II: Novemeber Steps

The following day, in the same studio, another rehearsal is in progress. Illuminated only by sunlight, Kim Nofsinger, assistant professor of dance, and student Kelly Southall are practicing Nofsinger’s “November Steps.” Nofsinger cues up the whitenoise accompaniment — an electrically altered composition he jokingly refers to as “the killer bees.” With the CD ready, he and Southall leave the studio and then return, as if entering the stage in performance.

The two are well-matched. At 5 feet 9 inches, Southall is several inches shorter than Nofsinger, but both are lithe and lean, with chiseled features. (To increase the resemblance for performance, the student will shear off his spiky locks to match Nofsinger’s close-cropped look.) Southall crouches downstage, while Nofsinger takes his position upstage left. As the dance begins, Nofsinger’s sharp, quick movements contrast with Southall’s more languid ones. About 90 seconds into the piece, the student slithers backwards across the floor and between Nofsinger’s legs — and then climbs onto his partner’s back. For the next four and a half minutes, Southall’s feet never touch the floor.

Nofsinger crawls on all fours with Southall like a monkey on his back; he swings Southall in front of him, cradling the student like a baby; Southall walks up Nofsinger’s legs and over onto his back.

It is an amazing display of strength for both men, but the only signs of strain are in the taut, sinewy muscles revealed by their tank tops and short leotards.

The overall effect is at once oddly intimate and disturbing. Is Southall a burden or a blessing?

“It’s an almost coincidental relationship — in a way the other person doesn’t exist, but they operate with each other,” Nofsinger says when the seven-and-a-half-minute piece is over.

He created “November Steps” in late 2002 as a duet for Southall and a female student, with Southall dancing the supporter’s role. But for a faculty dance tour, Nofsinger has stepped in for Southall’s now-graduated partner, and the two have switched roles.

Nofsinger’s athletic style reflects his background: He started out as a therapeutic recreation major at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. The instructor in a required ballroom dance class encouraged Nofsinger to audition for the school’s folk dance troupe. He did so well there that the director urged him to try out for the modern dance company.

“I just got addicted,” he says.

And he approaches dance with a convert’s zeal. Regular improvisational sessions give him ideas for movement that he calls on in his blitzkrieg approach to choreography: He creates most pieces in 75 to 90 minutes.

“It’s a learned thing for me,” he says. “I’ve trained and worked enough that when I get it, I know it. I trust intuition to develop a piece and know when it’s ready to happen.”

With the basics sketched out, Nofsinger refines and finesses his work in intensive rehearsals. Instead of stopping midway through to correct a movement, he and Southall run through the entire piece, then discuss it. He takes the same tack with the members of his own professional troupe, the Shelter Repertory Dance Theater. The company’s dancers live in five different states and gather each summer to perform. “It’s their responsibility to rehearse on their own so that when we get together, we can put it onstage quickly,” Nofsinger says.

His overtly physical style is emphasized by his choices in accompaniment. Only rarely does he use music. “When you put on music, you try to make everything fit the music and the dance loses its communicative power,” he argues. “It becomes about the music, rather than about movement.”

Using found sound or white noise not only accentuates movement, but also can provide a disturbing background for the social issues that frequently inspire Nofsinger’s work — such as AIDS/HIV and domestic violence. (As the Iraqi war loomed, he restaged a piece for the winter 2003 student dance concert that was accompanied by 13 minutes of air-raid sirens.)

“November Steps,” though, is part of a larger project Nofsinger calls “The White Room,” a metaphor for death and dying. He asked friends what they would do if they were locked in a pure white room. Their responses — a new mother said she would sleep, another friend said he’d go insane — form the basis for segments like “November Steps.”

“I try to understand the physicality of their reactions: How does an idea become a sentient physical expression?” he says. He relies on his powers of observation and his keen understanding of movement to make the translation — but can’t pinpoint how it happens.

“The body has a way of knowing and responding,” he says simply. “If you can put it into words, you don’t have to dance it.”

Coda: Performance

Weeks of practice have paid off for Nofsinger and Southall; “November Steps” had its official premiere at a dance concert at Ohio University’s Lancaster campus. The exacting Nofsinger is pleased. “Partnering of this nature is extremely difficult, and we were able to sustain our focus throughout the duration of the piece,” he says.

Although rehearsals lead to performance, the performance isn’t the end of the process, Geller says. “One doesn’t truly see the dance until it is performed,” she notes. “It might even take several performances to get a clear take on what is working.”

Performance can be harrowing. Aside from errors and technical problems, presenting work to an audience means exposing your thoughts and experiences to strangers. That kind of revelation might sound intimidating, but Nofsinger says it’s part of the process.

“On some level you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable in order to have an honest and distinctive voice,” he says. “At times it is hard but I feel so many of the problems in the world today stem from the fact that people cower from being seen as individuals.”

Geller is still developing her piece with Gatling; she hopes it will premiere in the university’s 2004 Winter Dance Concert. Although the collaboration has meant sharing a very personal experience with her colleague, Geller says that in the end, that revelation is less important in the creation of the dance than the mutual communication through movement.

“While the process entailed sharing some personal feelings, I believe making art should not be self-indulgent,” she says. “What I would like to share with the dancers and the audience is not so much personal revelation as it is an eagerness to provide an experience that they are wanting to engage in.

“The only thing I hope for is that they are willing to meet me halfway.”

For more information about the School of Dance, visit the website at
http://www.dance.ohiou.edu/