Grad Student Spotlight on Eco-Artist Samantha Schmeer

Third-year MFA dance candidate Samantha Schmeer grew up in upstate New York on a rural road in a small town. Time spent in her family’s gardens and the Adirondack wilderness forged a strong connection to the natural environment which permeates her choreographic and performance research work. A self-described “eco-artist-scholar,” Schmeer is invested in interdisciplinarity. She holds a BA in English literature from SUNY Geneseo, where she graduated cum laude with minors in Dance and Legal Studies.

Creatively, Samantha values integration over a focus on pure movement through investigations of consciousness, memory, and landscape. Her practice sees setting and landscape not as backdrop, but as character and cultural force. She explores site-specificity, eco-embodiment, and atmospheric world-building through the combined use of movement, film, and soundscapes to examine and forge new understandings of human-environment relationships. Her research focuses on the intersections of performance with human ecology and sustainability.

Samantha currently works multiple part-time jobs in arts administration and development, both at UB Theatre and Dance and remotely for independent dance companies, and she is a graduate ambassador for the College of Arts and Sciences. Samantha has taught classes at UB as part of her course work, and teaches dance independently as well. She is also President of the Theatre and Dance Graduate Student Association.

As with many students of dance, ballet was Samantha’s entry point to the arts. “My mom had a VHS tape called I Want to be a Ballerina, or something similar, and it was about The Nutcracker audition process, so I started in a combined tap / ballet class when I was three or four,” Schmeer said. “Then I pursued ballet because I didn’t like the noise of the tap shoes, and my mom chose a studio that did a production of The Nutcracker, which I began performing in when I was five.

“I was around eight or nine when I picked up jazz, and then modern after that. Around age fourteen I switched studios and the new one was more competition-based. That’s when I took up contemporary / lyrical.

“Ballet is very restrictive in terms of body type,” Schmeer explained. “You need to get somewhat lucky with your skeleton in a way. I don’t have the feet for ballet. I have a really tapered toe, so when I went on pointe I lost my toenails regularly! I have the turnout, but not the arches; I knew I didn’t fit the ballet mold properly.”

Schmeer’s interest in contemporary dance was a natural transition: “I’m more suited to it,” she said. “I liked being able to learn less about codified steps and experiment more at a young age. I became interested in creating choreography and solos for myself in high school, though I wasn’t yet thinking about it a critical way, the differences between competitive dance and concert dance.”

Pursuing dance as a profession didn’t occur to Schmeer until halfway through her time as a Geneseo undergraduate. “In my junior year it became harder to picture my life without dance and the arts,” she said. “Coincidentally, as I built community relationships and began to understand dance more as a field and the resources behind it, Geneseo’s Dance Ensemble had its 50th anniversary and many alumni came back to speak about their varied careers, interests, and research which didn’t include becoming a professional dancer. That’s when the wheels started turning about other potential careers in dance without being a performer.”

Schmeer gravitated toward academic research: “My papers started to get traction and I began attending conferences that looked at dance through an interdisciplinary lens,” she explained. “When I began to understand written dance research and how to present it, I received positive feedback, which was another turning point in thinking specifically about graduate school.”

In her time in the MFA Dance program with UB Theatre and Dance, Schmeer has presented research at several academic conferences and is honored to have received a Public Humanities Grant from Humanities New York for her thesis project this weekend in the UB Center for the Arts Black Box Theatre. Open to the general public, the MFA Thesis Concert is the culmination of each MFA’s creative and written scholarship. Each evening performance is open to the general public and Schmeer’s work will be featured alongside that of fellow third-year MFA candidates Abby Cass and Anna Caison Boyd.

Regarding her focus on interdisciplinarity, Schmeer explained, “I come from three different areas of study that have some crossover, but perhaps not the obvious ones. Between Legal Studies, Literature, and Dance I started creating more interdisciplinary projects.

“One of my English classes was an archival research process about the New Deal, which corresponded with a Dance History paper, which then led into legal (classes) since we were studying Constitutional, Tribal and Business Law. Bridging the connections between fields and disciplines was interesting. When I talk about ecology in dance, I bring in historical events and theories from American and Indigenous Studies, where they intersect.

“Dance and the performing arts have never been in a vacuum,” she added. “Though the field can sometimes feel insular, partially because you have professionals-who I admire greatly-who are so passionate about dance, and what it takes to be a professional dancer is so demanding, that it can feel more insular as opposed to fields like literature and the sciences which are more encapsulating of other things.” Schmeer hopes that her studies will one day contribute to wider scholarship about dance in the broader context of culture and history.

“Interdisciplinary research is having a bit of a renaissance right now, especially with the state of the world. I think there’s been a push by many in academia to say, ‘We need to be engaging with people outside of our discipline.’ It’s also rising due to the climate crisis. I feel I’m on a bit of newer ground with that, though I’m not a forerunner.

“Some of my (written) work draws connections which are already there, but not everyone else sees yet. For example, another of the recent papers I took to conference is about the evolution of ecology and how it relates to performance. Henry David Thoreau was an early ecologist in terms of understanding where that study and adjacent fields come from, but he’s not necessarily who you might think of in terms of sustainability because he’s known mainly as a transcendentalist author.”

Schmeer’s choreographic and written research are directly related. “I’m interested in performance, sustainability, and how nature is culture,” she said. “My creative research is more about depicting nature as a cultural force, understanding nature as a part of us, and not something separate to be extracted (from) or aestheticized. I have a paper about ‘#cottagecore’ on TikTok and how it fits in historically in representing sustainability among the current generation of young people.”

For those unfamiliar with ‘#cottagecore,’ Schmeer elaborated: “It was an ‘aesthetic trend’ on social media, especially TikTok, during the (COVID-19) pandemic. Aesthetic trends are very big with Gen Z and Alphas-the idea of aesthetic, as well as naming the latest aesthetic. There can be other types of ‘cores’ too, like ‘witchcore’ and ‘grandmacore.’”

Schmeer’s research traced the rise of cottagecore prior to COVID-19, and then the peak at its height. “Cottagecore romanticizes and highly values simple living and interconnected existence with nature, and it’s depicted in a variety of ways,” she said. “For example, living in a cottage in the woods, where you forage for berries, and have a little garden, with chicken and eggs.

“I examined TikTok videos as a performance mode since people create fifteen-second videos towards the aesthetic. I unpacked how they’re crafted, and what’s being valued within them. Textural values and how kinesthetic empathy is functioning, and the colors used, and how the TikToks are, for lack of a better term, being ‘choreographed,’ ‘produced ,’ and then put online to craft this aesthetic valuing self-sufficiency and harmonious living with nature."

Schmeer’s research raised many questions. “What did this trend that many young people saw on TikTok mean for sustainability culture, including recycling and electric cars? What does depicting sustainability in this very specific way mean for how we perceive it? And why was this popular in 2020 when we were watching a collapse (COVID-19 and accompanying economic disruption) happen around us? Why is this push for a return to pastoral, escapist fantasies coming back now?

“In terms of Thoreau, was he the originator of cottagecore? I discussed the historical evolution of ecology and homesteading and other influences. There’s the (base) idea of simple living in connection with nature, but when you’re performing on TikTok you almost have to create a hyper-reality.

“Ironically, under capitalism and the way we’re living now, (creating cottagecore videos) requires a baseline level of economic privilege, especially to perform the aesthetic in this way. And when a skyscraper can be seen in the background (of a video) it breaks into the fantasy element, so you ideally need access to rural property, which isn’t available to many people.

“The paper examines the positive aspects and the faults of the trend. (The fantasy of) escaping from capitalism is a big part of it. It also touches upon the helplessness that many people feel in wanting to become self-sufficient again and the ways in which a capitalist system alienates a self-sustaining lifestyle to those who would benefit the most from it.

“Many people are talking about how they want to live in a little cottage in the woods and just make enough money to not have to work 50 hours a week to barely get by. Especially with generations that are becoming disenchanted with the whole system. It becomes an escapist fantasy if you think you’ll never be able to afford to buy a house.”

As with many aesthetic trends on TikTok and social media, they quickly rise and fall in popularity. “You still see cottagecore, though each person’s ‘For You’ page is individually tailored to your interests with its algorithim, so some people weren’t aware of it (at all), but on the whole we seem to be moving back toward towards maximalism and overconsumption again (on the platform).”

Regarding choreography, Schmeer has presented work at various UB dance concerts over the last three years including: Shutterspeed, the MFA Showcase, Emerging Choreographer's Showcase, and ChoreoLab this spring, all of which lead to the MFA Thesis Concert.  

“I tend to work with soloists a lot. I like putting one person in an environment to have genuine interactions with that one person (in the work’s creation)." However, her recent work for ChoreoLab, titled The Lake Knows My Name, was created for eight dancers. “It stems from time in the Adirondacks while I was growing up. We lived a few hours south of there in the capital region, but I was in the Adirondacks every summer for our family vacations.

“One of the hallmark sounds there is the call of the loon. The atmosphere for my piece was dusk and night, using lake noises of the region. There’s a spoken word element about what’s heard on the soundtrack because the loon can be easily mistaken with wolf or coyote if you’re unfamiliar with it. A man is heard speaking about the call of the loon, which can masquerade as many different animals. He’s not a narrator though.

“The dancers embodied the atmosphere, including the water and trees in the fall of night. When I create a nature work I’m not interested in creating a plot and characters within that space. All of the dancers were embodied in the whole spirit of dusk. There were moments that allude to the loon and trees. It’s simply to create a mood and vibe. In trying to construct a setting the dancers’ costumes were a call to the same idea. They each wore a monochromatic color based off of what happens when you peer at a mountain range and the closest mountains are darkest and they get lighter blue as you look further away. Each dancer is a different level (of color) of that blue / green."

Much of Schmeer’s other choreographic work has been created for film. This Compost features sophomore Dance major Fallon Tuholski, who is sometimes mistaken for Schmeer given that they share straight blonde hair and a similar physique. The quiet, meditative piece begins on a sunny morning in a field of trees and short grass with soft, ambient piano music.

Tuholski lies beneath a large broken tree where a deer bone is found, which she picks up and performs with, sometimes cradling it or manipulating it through space, sometimes seeming to barely hang onto it, and also suggesting it as the foundation of a bow, pulling her other arm back as a quiver to launch an invisible arrow.

The introductory music drops out and another solo piano piece begins, with Tuholski in an open field. In a contemporary movement style, she is sometimes glimpsed at a distance through low foliage. She balances the bone upon on the back, holds it close, and extends it as if offering to another. Deer wander randomly into frame.

We see a closeup of rotting apples in the grass, being eaten by ants and bees. Eventually, Tulholski drops the bone, as if receiving a shock, then slowly backs away from it as the camera descends into the grass.

“It was originally conceived as a site-specific work in the park,” Schmeer said of This Compost. “The idea came out of a prop study in Professor Jenna Zavrel’s Dancemaking 1 class during my first year at UB. I don’t hunt, but I collect animal bones and seem to find them all the time! I chose a deer bone for Fallon to work with in the video.

“The title is from a poem by Walt Whitman in which he’s contending with own mortality while looking at the ground. He says, ‘My flesh to Earth, as to other flesh,’ and I sometimes use that as an alternate title. The piece isn’t a literal illustration of the poem, but takes some ideas from it, as he’s mostly disgusted by the ground throughout, and that’s not really what I was going for.

“As a lot of my work is an investigation of human consciousness, I’m trying to create a setting and a mood and the way that memories feel to me. Nostalgia is a common theme. For example, when I think back to 2012, I don’t consider it in terms of the break of the new year and its linear events. I think more about a perfume that I wore a lot and what the year felt like. What were the smells and sounds, and what music was popular? All of those memories together converge in a cluster that I try to capture.

“Dystopian imagery is not something I value in my work for a variety of reasons, so I wanted to use the bone to communicate coming from and going back into the Earth as human beings. We are the Earth and we are nature, not separate, which is why the rotting apple is shown.

“I’ve done a lot of reading about effective video imagery and sustainability culture, and, at least for the current generation, dystopian imagery tends to be very ineffective in inspiring actual change. It makes people feel very hopeless, which is not something I aim to convey. (For example), dropping in (an image of) a polar bear on an iceberg (to say), ‘Isn’t that sad?’ Or including a wildfire: ‘Doesn’t that make you sad? Don’t you feel bad? Aren’t you concerned?’ I don’t want to interrogate the viewer that way. I’m okay with creating a sad work, but not a didactic call-to-action. That’s not my practice.

“The piece is a duet between dancer and deer bone and I was happy that the deer in the background became an (inadvertent) part of it. The dancer looks at the bone and considers it and herself and (her eventual) decay in life and death, though it’s not a straight narrative.

Fallon Tuholski once again features in the live version of This Compost, which Schmeer separately titled Bones Will Linger.

As in This Compost, once the dancer is upon her feet the deer bone is both prop and dancing partner. Her movements are spastic and staccato, with quick juttings of the bone, which is sometimes held forward. There is more movement across the stage canvas than in the film version and the bone is held beneath her chin, then balanced on a single foot before being held again.

At the end of the work the bone is returned to its original spot and the dancer stands still a few feet away before retreating. Was this purposeful? “Yes, because we haven’t reached a resolution (yet) emotionally,” Schmeer said. “We’re still contending with ideas about mortality.”

“For a lot of my nature films, people ask ‘Who is the main character?’ It’s a running theme and foundational part of my thesis. I’m not interested in the dancer being the main character or there being a one at all. There isn’t a battle per se between the setting and the human in the frame. I’m more interested in it seeming like a duet.”

Reflecting on the Theatre and Dance MFA at UB, Schmeer observed, “UB’s program is different from a lot of others. We tend to see more MFA students who are interested in research and pedagogy in a way that some schools which are more performance-based don’t. It’s so interdisciplinary that, from year to year, new grad students can swing greatly in where they fall on the spectrum from performance to research. We all have to be invested in both, plus teaching, but some move further towards one area than others. The interdisciplinary focus at UB really drew me in.”

She added that Dance MA students tend to be more research-based than their Dance MFA colleagues, who generally favor choreography and performance. The terminal degree for students who choose an MA track is often a PhD in Theatre, Performance Studies, or a related discipline. “Since this is an MFA program at a research school, we frame our choreographic practice as part of our research,” she said.

“There are things which dance, theatre and music scholars are uniquely equipped to talk about, including all of social media, which are performances of sorts. Theories of emdodiment came up a lot in my cottagecore paper. People are using these skill sets to look at the arts and cultural phenomena to examine what’s happening right now.”

Schmeer’s 25-minute thesis piece, called Myself to Earth: Infinitely Contingent, will debut at the MFA Showcase this weekend, and is accompanied by written research. As with much of Samantha's other work, it interrogates ideas of landscape and primary character, moving away from the concept of a main character(s) or narrator. The work opens with a filmed section of two dancers on a beach.

“(I’m) trying to draw attention to interconnectedness (with nature), so the work features three soloists in all, who each perform in their own landscape. Each soloist was assigned a setting based off of writings that they did with me early in the process. There will be moments of stillness when we’re just watching the film, with a soundscape and text projected onstage for the audience to read about these ideas of what makes a landscape and how we view humans as part of it.

“One is in a lake, one is at the ocean on Long Island, and the other is in the woods. Then a duet takes place. After the film portion one live soloist comes onstage at the end to bridge (from film to live dancing).”

The soloist appears with filmed nature imagery (literally) projected onto her body as she interacts with it. “I don’t feel it’s useful to put landscape at an aestheticizing distance to project a mountain behind a dancer who doesn’t interact with it,” Schmeer said. “That’s not really a nature work to me because you’re still putting nature at a distance from humans and characterizing them as separate forces.

“‘Is this a dance film about sand, or is this about a person?’” Schmeer asked rhetorically. "(But) it’s about both of those things. It interrogates the ideas of what a landscape is and how we understand humans as intrinsically part of it instead of separate. How do we understand landscape as a cultural force which makes us who we are and our culture what it is, rather than something separate that is there for human extraction and use?”

Regarding her future ambitions upon graduation from UB, Schmeer said, “I want to pursue a PhD in research. I would eventually like to get into higher education in this realm of performance / theatre / dance.”