As the first term of the year wrapped up, the dance team performed a couple of the pieces we had been working on throughout the term in the studio.
We performed the two pieces from Parents Weekend–a Ukrainian folk dance and a contemporary piece–along with some solos we had crafted in class and even a theater piece.
Before coming to Groton, I had only ever done ballet classes, so I’m glad to have expanded my repertoire this term. For the Ukrainian dance, we got to dance in (high-heeled) character shoes, which was very exciting and novel for me. I also learned to safely fall straight forward in the contemporary piece!
After looking through the dance costume room, we found golden face masks, which we decided to incorporate into the contemporary piece. We started the piece wearing the masks and took them off during the performance, thus naming that dance “Persona” as taking off the masks began to mark the beginning of a new persona.
I’ve always loved choreographing my own dances, whether it be during the summer with my sister or in classes. This term, especially after the Parents Weekend performance, we got a lot of freedom to design our own pieces. They originally started with prompts given in class; for instance, we got four moves (words) and had to combine and choreograph them into a congruent phrase (sentence). Then we expanded on the prompts we were most inspired by and developed them with music until we had enough to perform an entire song. We also got feedback both from the teachers and from each other periodically in class, which helped improve the pieces.
In addition to the dance, I surprisingly (only came upon the idea the day before the showing was scheduled) also performed a theater piece I had made in my Improv and Movement elective. It was a comedic silent piece of taking out the trash. Seeing theater and dance in parallel has always been remarkable for me. Previously, I always saw them separately, but the two do complement and add to each other in beautiful and surprising ways.
As we had already had an on-stage performance during Parents Weekend, this end-of-the-term performance was more informal, and we performed it in the studio with quite a large show of people! After the performance, we all sat down in a circle and had a little Q&A as the audience asked us about the process and art of dancing and choreography.