Senior Fall Dance Concert Illuminates the Senses
Emma Stefanick
“It’s just crazy to think that we’ve got here so quickly,” says Brittany “Bert” Hawthorne.
Senior Brittany "Bert" Hawthorne. Photo by Sean Yuan.
Hawthorne was one of the seven graduating BFA dance performance and choreography seniors who showcased their work at the Fall Senior Dance Concert, “The Sensing Body”, this past weekend. Her piece, “1 Standing in the Middle,” tackled the idea of community through the motions, interactions and stepping patterns the group of eight dancers created together.
The concert was part of the Bachelor of Fine Arts dance performance and choreography senior capstone. To graduate students must choreograph and perform both a solo and group work for the fall and spring semesters. Seniors manage every aspect of the concert’s production in order to practice the skills needed in the professional field.
“It’s an opportunity for each [senior] to express their own individual creativity and concepts and ideas, says Senior capstone course professor Nathan Andary. “I felt like the evening definitely did that.”
Andary says an immense amount of growth and development has occurred throughout each student’s work.
Audience member Ailis Hayden went to an early showing of the pieces and says she enjoyed seeing the show evolve.
“It was very interesting to see how the pieces had developed. I thought it was great,” she says. “ It was very somber and serious, but at the same time, very intricate and complex.”
Kassie Keil, a senior studying dance performance and choreography, says putting on “The Sensing Body” was a deeply personal experience. “It’s definitely a culmination of all the things I’ve learned up to this point, particularly since I’ve come to college,” she says, “College has been a very transformative experience for me.”
Keil’s piece, “In the Blue Dark,” explored how bodies contain memories through movement. She reflects on the concept of anxiety through creeping and strained movements and restrained spatial interactions. Keil was inspired by a moment from her childhood.
“I just remember waking up in the middle of the night,” she says. “I was maybe like three or four, just hyperventilating, sobbing, just having a panic attack and my mom [was] holding me in her arms, rocking me back to sleep as I looked into the blue dark of my bedroom.”
The title “The Sensing Body” comes from a commonality between all seven of the showcased works. Each piece deals with the importance of sensation and embodiment of oneself in community, using this to communicate between each other.
“A lot of our pieces tackle what we’re thinking on a day-to-day basis or how we connect with people,” Hawthorne says. “Honestly, I’ve been trying my very best to communicate my feelings with other people more, so I wanted to do a piece that reflected how I felt everyday.”
Andary says the kindness and community he has seen in these senior dancers is evident in the show they have created.
“Dance is a way to explore and express our individuality and our collectivism as humans… It gives voice, it gives expression, it allows for people to feel and have agency and feeling,” he says. “This group in particular, one of their strongest assets is their deep seeded kindness. And there’s great power in that… They’re advocates for the self. They’re advocates for each other. They’re advocates for humanity… I look at them and I see a powerful group of individuals. And I thought this concert helped to showcase that.”