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Students Chelsea Costello and Elysia Pope waved their jazz hands and shrugged their shoulders as they danced onto stage Friday night. As one member of the duo pursued dancer Louis Roccato, the other sat on stage and began to convulse in a violent exorcism of flailed arms and swing-dance shoes.
“Points in Space” is the UNM Department of Theatre and Dance’s student choreography showcase. The show features 11 separate dances, ranging stylistically from tango and flamenco to stepping and modern dance. Every aspect of the show is student driven, from the dancing and choreography to the lighting and costuming.
Choreographer and department assistant Emily Bryan said the show not only provides a hands-on approach for students to learn how to produce a show, but it also gives them a platform for their work.
“It gives them a place to show what they’ve been working on, to have an audience for what they’ve been working on. Everything is really a work in progress, and to be able to get feedback from faculty members and people in the community is really important,” Bryan said. “Something happens when you take your work out of a studio place and into a performance. It’s a very good learning experience for the student.”
Bryan said the title of the show refers to the concept that different people exist within similar points in space. Much like the show, different worlds of dance are performed on the same stage. Bryan said she hopes her choreographed piece will transcend mere theatrics.
“I hope the audience is drawn into this world that I’ve created,” she said. “I worked really hard with the dancers in creating a very specific musical world that they are living in, and the idea of kinetic empathy and the way the dancers are moving so that the audience can get some sort of aesthetic hit from watching the piece, so that the audience feels engaged.”
Artistic director and visiting professor Zoe Knights said she was impressed with UNM’s dance department.
The head of the University’s dance department asked Knights, a choreography professor from Berlin, to teach for two semesters at the department. As art director, Knights is in charge of organizing and running the showcase. Knights said producing the show has been a learning experience for her, both as a professor and as someone who produces work on a different continent.
“I’m learning a lot about how it works, both in the university system and in the states, in terms of putting it on stage,” Knights said. “I’m used to in Europe doing a lot of stuff by myself; I have a very close connection with my light, designer and sound, and just being organized. It’s interesting to see these different areas do their jobs.”
Student performers crisscrossed every inch of the stage in the opening show Friday night. In Radi Shafie’s “Impermanence and the Eternal,” two students stalked each other, circling one another before colliding into an entangled tango crawl. Flamenco artist Dolores Garcia performed alongside live musicians at one moment in “Alegrias.” In “Romanza Andaluza,” Garcia competed against Carlos Menchaca in what can only be described as a flamenco marathon, a “Pepé Le Pew”-inspired chase ending in a fit of sweat, accompanied by laughter from the audience. Peter Bennett’s jazz-influenced ballet “The Parker Piece” saw his performers leap and dance in button-downs and ties and cocktail dresses.
Choreographer and performer Bennett said the student-driven show has helped him approach choreography from a holistic perspective.
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“I think it’s hugely educational in terms of what it takes to choreograph and to develop something from an idea into an actual work, an actual piece of art, in terms of planning it, scheduling your dancers, getting rehearsals in, shaping your piece,” he said.
“And then when that’s all done, you have to create a chance to work with designers and really learn that aspect about it as well. You can see the importance of lights, and how you can change a piece.”
Dancer Sarah Williams tackled one of the more difficult pieces of the night with the interpretive “Aqui, Adentro.”
“It’s a modern piece that is centering around memories and how we relate to our own memories, whether we want to keep them far away from us or keep them close,” Williams said. “Part of the piece is performed in silence, which is difficult for me as a performer, difficult for the audience just because it’s very tense.”
Williams opened the piece Friday near the edge of stage left, dancing in complete silence. As she began to grasp at the air near her head with one hand, a whirring buzz hummed throughout the stage. With the whir’s crescendo came Williams’ increasingly sporadic movement, as she flung her tightly clenched fingers above her head.
Williams said the piece is meant to cause anxiety among the viewers and really question their relationship with dance.
“I know it’s a very abstract piece, so I know a lot of people will be leaving feeling a little confused, which is good,” she said. “I would like them to leave examining themselves and how they feel in relation with dance in general.”
