Emily Lipson dances like someone else might walk: intuitively – every day – since the age of 3. A Visual Studies junior, Emily’s been dancing and choreographing in Strictly Funk, Penn’s sexiest hip hop dance group, since her freshman year. We meet at her home on campus: the Platt Performing Arts basement, where prior to the Funk show last weekend she spent 16 hours a week.
Emily sees dance as a form of self-expression, and watching her dance is like having a DMC with her soul. “When I feel intensely,” she explains, “dance is a way of moving through that emotion.” It’s sweaty and visceral: a translation of something internal into something physical. Funk encourages expression and experimentation, with choreographers having full creative licence with their dances. “We’re always open to being weird,” Emily laughs. “You just have to get behind the choreographer, and sometimes that means expanding what you understand dance to be.” Having gone from the most intense productive moment right before the Funk show last Thursday to having 16 hours of free time this week, Emily’s experiencing withdrawal. “This might be the sign of a problem, but I listened to John Legend’s ‘All of Me’ all day and I’m already trying to choreograph that.”
For Emily, dance doesn’t exist onstage only. She’s really affected by music. Like, very. To the point that she probably has musical ADHD. She gets distracted by tuba music filtering into our conversation from elsewhere in Platt, and sometimes when she’s out in a social situation, if there’s music playing, she forgets to be social. “I wish there were more opportunities in the social scene to just dance, for people to really let go and stop chatting and move.”
Even in you haven’t seen Emily dance, you’ve probably seen her artistic fingerprints on Locust Walk or social media. As Funk’s newly appointed Creative Director, she was responsible for the show’s promo film and posters. Emily shot and cut the sexy, epileptic film that advertised the show as well as footage integrated into the performances. Now that it’s over, she’s hoping to film certain dancers and dances from the show like Alex Yu hip hopping to “Grain of Sand”. Her films are artworks in themselves, but she sees them as documentation and dispersal. “For a dance, the audience is whoever turns up. For a film, the audience can be anyone.”
Emily’s not so much an artist as she is artistic, and her creative mind goes down many different avenues. In addition to dance, Emily’s creativity is manifest in her outfits, her photos and videos, her weekend plans (i.e.: “Lets paint Jay’s face with makeup to see if contouring really works”), and her tumblr Creepercave, which serves as a visual portfolio for all of the above. A couple of nights in the last few weeks she’s gone to a bar downtown dressed as different female stereotypes and interacted with strangers she’s found there. It’s for her latest performance art/ photo project about identity as a woman. She sees it like dance: a performance where the bar counter is the stage. As an artist and a person, Emily never stops moving.
