Fall Dance Concert Highlights Diversity

The Fall Dance Concert, “Mosaics from the Underground,” will open tomorrow night in the Dance Theater. The concert is a promising creation that aims to spark conversations about one of the College’s most emphasized values: diversity.

A collaboration involving 10 students and two professors, the concert features nearly 30 student performers and offers a strikingly intimate evening of creative work. The choreographers have created an accessible and relevant experience for audience members by integrating their own interests from across a variety of academic disciplines, including environmental studies and literature.

This concert is the product of a highly academic process, yet it speaks to everyone. It becomes an emotional experience once the viewer stops trying to read it cognitively. The creators of the show engage in conversation, not necessarily through “talking,” but through “showing” their thoughts, experiences, opinions and feelings.

By combining ideas from dance and environmental studies, Jessica Lee ’13 created a piece that evokes the excitement of foolish exploration, the difficulties of growing up and the challenges of college life.

“I danced my whole life and home for me became the dance studio and that involved following directions and discipline and following others in high school and doing what you think you have to get to college,” Lee said.

Doug LeCours ’13, a dance and English double major, turned to literature for inspiration. Citing the style of a favorite Virginia Woolf book, To the Lighthouse, his piece reflects a “stream of consciousness” through movement.

“The body moves as a whole, from the center, beginning from one place, and develops from there,” said LeCours while demonstrating a simple arm movement. But in this way, by constantly focusing on intentionality, simple gestures such as the movement of an arm can become graceful and powerfully moving.

These two choreographers take purposefully different approaches to beginning their work, yet both methods produce beautifully intimate kinesthetic experiences. Diversity emerges as a motif from the concert not because each piece is the same, or even similar, but because each of the 11 pieces focuses on what individual creators can relate to best — the self.

“We really thrive on the raw vigorous excitement of spontaneity,” explained Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Catherine Cabeen, who guided the students through her Dance 460 class this semester. She continued to detail the creative process she shared with her students.

“We started by using language to explore individual ideas that the students were very passionate about,” she said. “Then we examined how different movement qualities and compositional strategies can embody those ideas.  The resulting collection of works is diverse.  There are many different movement languages at play . . .  I see dance as a form of public scholarship that aims to inform as many people as possible about ideas that we feel passionate about.”

Noting that each choreographer comes from a different training background, Cabeen described how today most dancers must be comfortable using many different styles of dance. This necessity echoes another long standing college tradition — that of teaching and communicating across languages. Students share parts of themselves in their creative work using different movement traditions.

Diversity also emerges when considering the performers’ education and artistic backgrounds, as LeCours pointed out.

“I’m working with three people of incredibly different training backgrounds, which is really exciting,” he said.

His fellow dancers all have different levels of experience in performance and have trained differently as dancers and artists. In addition, their height difference also makes for some fascinating visual humor.

Dance, especially as these students use it, is a communicative language for sharing that which is touching, instinctive and fleeting. As LeCours observed, audience members, performers and even creators engage in the learning experience together.

“Secretly, it’s a process for all of us to discover what we’re dancing about,” he said.

“Mosaics from the Underground” opens Friday, Nov. 30, at 8 PM, with a second show at the same time Saturday evening.