Dance Spotlight: Faculty Concert

What exactly do professors do when they teach? Are they communicating some aspect of their experience — sharing some of their knowledge or perspective with students? Or are they laying bare their personal investigative process and human experience for all to see? The dance department this week presents four faculty members engaging in the latter, showing their individual and collaborative artistic work in the Faculty Dance Concert this Thursday, Feb. 26, at 8 p.m. in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts (MCA) Dance Theatre.

While students mainly engage with professors in the classroom setting, faculty are deeply immersed in their fields of study and continue to develop their research and work as they teach. This is especially so in the dance department, where professors interweave their teaching role into their lives as actively
creating artists.

“Particularly with professors in the arts, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that we also are artists and choreographers working with our own creative process — and we’re here also to share that knowledge with students. When it comes to making art, there’s no answer, no right or wrong way to do it. The faculty concert allows us to be part of that dialogue, to say we’re also researching these ideas and dealing with these difficult practices and questions,” Artist in Residence Scotty Hardwig said.

This performance will be the first faculty concert the department has held in over a decade, and will provide the new artists on the faculty this year the opportunity to share their personal creative research with the campus community. As the dance department makes the transition correlating with the retirement of two long-time faculty members, Andrea Olsen and Penny Campbell, the new faculty members’ artistic visions and interests are driving the direction of development for the dance program.

The concert also affords students the experience of working with professional dance artists — Meredith White ’16 will perform the premiere of “In Plain Sight” choreographed by Chair of the Dance Department Christal Brown, and Andrew Pester ’17 and Naomi Eisenberg ’18 will perform in Scotty Hardwig’s work created in collaboration with visual artist Kern Samuel. Assistant Professor of Dance Tzveta Kassabova will present her work “Little is left to tell,” performed by Emmakate Geisdorf, Joey Loto, and Lacey Moore, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Trebien Pollard will perform the excerpt “Shaking the Devil: the black swan effect” from his solo concert “Seeing the Unspeakable” which will premiere at Middlebury on April 2.

As students participate in and witness the creative processes of the faculty members they work with, the perspective arises that while we are students of our respective disciplines learning from professors with more experience in a field, we are also all curious human beings trying to understand our world through various lenses, disciplines and expressive practices. In this endeavor the line between the professor and the student — the teacher and the taught — blurs.

In the field of dance this is particularly evident because of the physical in-the-moment presence of performance.

“With dance, where the body is being made so public, there’s the vulnerability of displaying your craft so openly — there’s no barrier of language or scholarship or publication — it’s just you,” Hardwig said.

Professors Brown, Hardwig and Pollard will dance in the concert with all the vulnerability, honesty and openness of artistic performance.

One of the fundamental unifying qualities of dance as an expressive and investigative art form is the physical, bodily experience that we all share. Regardless of how we intellectually analyze or understand a dance piece, as audience members we physically experience the presence of other human beings expressing an aspect of their humanity, and that alone can deeply affect our perception of other people and their lives.

By presenting this performance, the dance department faculty members are inviting us into the physical expressive experience and into their lives as artists and educators in a way that is profoundly vulnerable, but also characteristic of art as a means of communicating experience and inviting connection.

“In the process of showing our creative research, we’re placing our bodies for public witness,” Hardwig said. “That’s really powerful and crosses boundaries in a really amazing way.”