Nine different student choreographers have been creating nine original modern dances since October for the annual Resonance Embodied Winter Student Dance Concert. The concert will be performed at 8 p.m. tonight through Feb. 16 in Gerlinger Annex’s M. Frances Dougherty Dance Theater.
Choreographer Rebecca Rank said all the dances are categorized as modern, which means “anything goes.”
Choreographer Tracy Webster said modern dance is defined by “personal interpretation,” meaning that no one dance is like another. Each has different moves, different music and incorporates different kinds of styles, such as ballet, jazz, hip-hop and even breakdancing.
Webster’s dancers begin in unison, but as Radiohead’s “Climbing up the Walls” continues, the dancers twitch and spasm across the floor. Her dancers wear near-nude costumes that consist of skin-colored leotards with patches of black mesh sewn on randomly.
When Webster put together the costumes, she said she was “thinking about something odd that people would find scary, but also cool.”
She said the costumes are part of the overall theme of her dance
— insanity.
“Everyone mentions insanity when they interpret this song,” she said. “Some interpret it as relationships driving them mad. I’ve heard the writer worked at a mental institution.”
She said the dance starts as an organized group but eventually falls apart.
The dancers “start out symmetrical, cool and calm,” she said. “Then the lights turn red, and everything spirals out of control.”
Rank’s five dancers, on the other hand, wear red satin dresses. Their faces are painted solid white, their cheekbones highlighted with perfectly pink circles, and their lips are a deep red. After watching them rehearse, Rank still wasn’t satisfied with the makeup.
“Your lipstick needs to be darker, and your white needs to be so much darker,” she told the dancers.
She said the costumes and dance were inspired by the five months she spent studying in Austria, where she became drawn to the ornamentation expressed in Baroque art. She tried to represent the period in the makeup and costumes.
“Obviously the dancers couldn’t wear a corset, though,” she said.
There isn’t a strict story line to her dance, she said. She incorporated stories and pieces that stuck out in her mind when she was in Austria.
“I took those interesting tidbits — the stuff we weren’t tested on — and turned them into movement,” she said.
For both choreographers, this is one of the first times they’ve been on the “other side of the stage” for a big performance. They are dancers as well as choreographers, and experiencing a performance as a choreographer is much different than as a dancer, according to the pair.
Associate Professor Sherrie Barr said the annual concert is a “strong part of the curriculum” because not only do students gain experience in choreography, they also learn how to produce an entire dance performance, which includes arranging lighting, designing costumes, and finding dancers.
“In a sense, it gets them to put what they’ve learned into practice,” she said. “They learn to generate and invent movement and put it into a cohesive whole to create dance.”
Tickets are available at the door and are $5 for students and seniors, and $10 for the general public. Tonight’s performance is $2 off per couple for Valentine’s Day.