Dancing fabric

Combining a love of dance with fabric architecture concepts, graduate student Amber Sausen creates a dynamic performance space

This Master of Architecture thesis project looked at capturing the movement of dance and used it to inspire a temporary fabric structure to house dance in an outdoor, urban space. An initial desire to create a kinetic fabric structure evolved into a piece that allows the body to move through the layered openings and to be seen through the translucent fabric.

“I studied the work of Flying Foot Forum, a Minneapolis-based dance company,” says Amber Sausen, “and used the free program IOGraph as a simple tool to capture the dancers’ motion from video. The final piece is a materialization of ideas presented in the Flying Foot Forum choreography, interpreted through fabric architecture. Textiles were the perfect medium to embody the ideas of kinetic movement and bridge the gap between clothing the body and sheltering/creating the stage.”

The project was documented in the Dancing Fabric blog: www.dancingfabric.wordpress.com

Amber Sausen is a graduate student in architecture in the School of Architecture, College of Design at the University of Minnesota.