Graduate student of choreography Elizabeth Terschuur to present her deeply personal final concert 'Off The Grid'

Elizabeth Terschuur describes herself as both a rebel and an underdog. Tonight, the third-year graduate student with an emphasis in choreography will present her final concert, “Off The Grid,” in Kaufman 200. According to Terschuur, the work is deeply personal and unusually intense.

Terschuur said the name “Off The Grid” came about after hearing a friend talk about a family member who had literally gone “off the grid” by renouncing all digital and modern commodities.

“For my concert, I felt that “˜off the grid’ was a funny metaphor for saying that I’m off the normative grid and the concert is off the grid,” Terschuur said.

Terschuur’s dancing career began at age six when her mother enrolled her in dance class at the local strip mall because she was so clumsy and uncoordinated that she could not walk straight. A mere 10 years later, she was dancing professionally as a ballerina with the Washington Ballet.

Yet despite her classical training as a ballet dancer, Terschuur said she is not interested in perfection. For her, it is the realization that we are not perfect, learning to accept failure and to embrace heterogeneity that makes for interesting subject matter. According to Terschuur, tonight’s show will reflect precisely those ideas and the questions they generate. During the concert, Terschuur will perform a duet with Nguyen Nguyen, a fellow graduate student with an emphasis in choreography. According to Terschuur, the concept for the duet arose from deep, personal conversations between herself and Nguyen.

“We realized that we wanted to talk about our questions about how we see ourselves in a community and how the community sees us,” she said. “How often do we all force our judgments and our assumptions on someone, and how does that affect them and their identity? Those are all questions we explore in this piece.”

Nguyen, who originally pursued a career within science and has completed a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and genetics, said that he believes the duet represents a form of social interaction between two people who on paper could not be more different.

“We come from different cultures, different backgrounds and physically we look very different. The question then becomes: “˜Who am I, then?’ and “˜Who is she?'” Nguyen said. “It is through our interaction that our identities start to shape.”

The concert will also feature two short dance films, which were created as collaborations between Terschuur and Da Xu, an artist and filmmaker, and Heather Coker, a second-year graduate student with an emphasis in choreography at UCLA.

Xu said that he was drawn to this project because of the very personal nature of the project and the density of emotion that seemed to pervade it. According to Xu, his film seeks to explore the feeling of being in a claustrophobic space that may provide you with boundaries but that may also end up imprisoning you.

“Liz’s voice (as a dancer) is so strong and so different, and the whole performance is really a reflection of that voice in many different ways,” Xu said. “I think the creative process of this performance has really helped Liz work through a lot of her personal problems.”

When Terschuur first came to UCLA, she said that the professor of dance and composition, Victoria Marks, had a major impact on her growth as a dancer. Marks’ work within dance film was especially influential in regard to tonight’s concert, which Terschuur said is also an exploration of the relationship between dance and film.

“Liz really celebrates imbalance and off-center and illogic in very interesting ways,” Marks said. “Her work is exciting because it is not just about the artists on stage ““ it also asks us as an audience to look at ourselves differently.”

According to Terschuur, as people enter the theater tonight, ambient park sounds will play as a way of preparing audience members to step into another world entirely. She said it was especially important to her that tonight’s concert sprang from both an autobiographical as well as a collaborative foundation in order to be able to explore the idea of self-actualization.

“Liz is a very interesting new choreographer. She is both honest, bold and not afraid to go to darker places of the human soul,” Marks said. “I think the audience will go away with a real appreciation for Liz and her commitment to visual imagery.”