Becoming "(a)shore"

KSU dance professor’s film calls attention to Georgia coast, inspires students

By Kennesaw State University

August 5^th, 2024

One semester into her college career, Gianna Post danced on the cold sand of Driftwood Beach, an iconic site on Jekyll Island along Georgia’s coast. Wearing a flowing red dress and red socks, her fluid movements belied the breezy December chill. At times she carried pieces of driftwood and scattered them around the beach. Other times she waded into chilly ankle-deep waters and let waves surround her. Post moved as assistant professor of dance Autumn Eckman called out prompts, embracing the harsh environment to tell a story.

“It was freezing and I had never danced in that climate before,” said Post, who studies in Kennesaw State University’s Department of Dance. “I had to push so hard because I was stuck in the sand. It was so different than anything I’d done, but it was the coolest experience.”

KSU assistant professor of dance Autumn Eckman

Laney Burns, who graduated from KSU in May 2024 with a bachelor's in dance

Eckman, with the help of Post and recent KSU graduate Laney Burns, created the film “(a)shore” as part of an exhibit called “Waves of Wonder” at the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum in Savannah. The exhibit and film premiered in June and will run through the end of September.

For the exhibition, the museum commissioned 11 artists from around Georgia to create pieces that highlighted the environmental beauty and ecological precarity of Georgia’s coastline. Each artist received up to a $5,000 grant from the University of Georgia Marine Extension and the Georgia Sea Grant Artists, Writers and Scholars program. And each artist—painters, writers, sculptors and dancers among them— helped tell the story of the changing environment in southeast Georgia.

“A lot of what I feel in that space reflects a lot that you see in urban abandoned spaces. We create these things, and then we abandon them,” Eckman said. “How do you embrace the beauty of something that's barren and there's nothing there? Life is coming back to it. It's becoming overgrown, trees are growing, plants are growing. I wanted to draw that contrast and comparison that we need to keep these places vibrant and thriving.”

The film came to life with the award of the grant from the AWS program. Eckman conceived the film in spring 2023 and started working on ideas for the 11-minute film in the summer as she spent vacation time at Jekyll Island, which included not only hanging out at the beach but consulting with stormwater specialists and researchers at the marine extension.

“During that time at Jekyll Island, I started to see even when I was driving down there for vacation a lot of things are changing,” she said. “They're taking a lot of land down and putting in automobile plants, things like that. So, I was curious about how I could speak to the necessity to care, draw attention about if we don't have these places to go to, if we don't preserve them, we're not going to have them. I really care about that, and so that's what the film addresses.”

Eckman also enlisted the aid of Chicago-based composer Dan Myers, who created original music for the film. In the fall semester, she met Post at an event for new dance majors and immediately recruited the freshman for the project. Burns had won an award in the Adobe Creative Jam competition, and Eckman figured Burns’ style would enhance the film.

“I think our department and especially the College of the Arts does such a beautiful job of helping these students discover,” Eckman said. “They come in thinking they're going to do one thing and they walk out with a whole new skill set in another thing that contributes to their potential. Laney is the perfect example of that.”

Post stepped out of her comfort zone to trade smooth-floored studios and stages for the beach, to perform a largely unscripted dance on a couple of cold December days. She discovered a malleability in her spontaneous movements, a large step from her original life as a competition dancer performing heavily scripted routines.

“I was envisioning being on the stage and the performing aspect of that, but definitely not the beach and not the filming aspect of it,” said Post, a sophomore dance major focused on contemporary dance. “The entire time that we were there, from being outside to the unchoreographed dance itself, it was just such a growth experience for me."

“The entire time that we were there, from being outside to the unchoreographed dance itself, it was just such a growth experience for me.”

Gianna Post, sophomore dance major

Post wasn’t the only one who stepped into the unknown. A spring 2024 graduate with her bachelor’s in dance and a concentration in ballet, Burns had dabbled in filmmaking, just creating dance videos for social media, but she figured her future would involve teaching in a studio and picking up dance performances where she could. At Kennesaw State, Burns took a dance filmmaking class taught by associate professor Andrea Knowlton, which gently nudged her in the new direction. In the end, Burns came out of the project with a new skill set.

“That was kind of the whole gist of my time at KSU. I went in only knowing two pathways — become a dance teacher or become a performer and join a company. That's not the case at all,” she said. “There are so many different avenues to use a dance degree and the art, and KSU gave me such a deeper understanding of those ways. I just took on a bunch of things to see which one I liked and see which one wants to stick. Filmmaking was one of them that I got exposed to and I'm very grateful for that.”

As Burns and Post continue in their journeys, so do Eckman and her film. She will present a poster about this project related to education in the arts at KSU’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) Summit in September. “(a)shore” has also been invited to screen at a conference in New Zealand in January, and she has been invited to create a movement class at Jekyll Island in conjunction with the marine extension and the AWS program in May 2025.

A project originally conceived to shine a light on the environmental precariousness of the Georgia coastline took its three participants in new directions. Eckman said the focus of a Kennesaw State education should be on the students, and Burns and Post will take their experiences with them for life.