For those students looking for a break from studying for exams, the second annual Student Dance Concert aims to provide a unique artistic experience for all.
Saint Louis University dance students will perform modern dance improvisatory pieces that the students worked on throughout the fall semester.
“Modern dance is an art discipline with movement as its medium or language,” said Susan Gash, who instructs the two modern dance classes. “We speak through our bodies conveying ideas, emotions and abstract concepts.”
Gash added that modern dance originated in the United States at the turn of the century. It is poetry in motion. The primary focus of modern dance is expression, not entertainment. It asks audiences to think, react and feel.”
Katie Stotler, a student in the advanced modern dance class, said that the dance style is challenging.
“It’s the most basic form of dance,” Stotler said. “The movement in modern dance has meaning and inspiration behind it.”
Stotler added that in choreographing modern dance, the dancers must consider all of their movements and inspiration in combination.
Gash said that the dance students have taken technique and composition classes, giving them “a vocabulary for creating dance and using their bodies in space and time expressively.”
Eleven students from the intermediate modern dance class will present a series of duets based on contemporary poetry. The five students in the advanced modern dance class will perform a group piece with the theme of comfort. The five dance students will also present solo performances.
The group piece, Stotler said, will focus on the “creation of movements playing with and breaking from comfort time.”
In rehearsing for this piece, the group members used contact improvisation, a series of movements in which contact in the form of lifts helped the students to adapt and learn each others’ style.
The advanced modern dance class received creative inspiration by going to the St. Louis Art Museum and looking at exhibits, eventually choosing one piece to work with in choreographing their solo dances. For example, Stotler chose a chair to symbolize an actual person.
“The chair is not just a prop,” Stotler said. “The chair symbolizes a person interacting with the chair, with a coming-of-age theme. The dance is a creation of interaction with the chair, as a mother-daughter relationship.”
All pieces in the concert were choreographed by the students. The jazz dance class, instructed by Draza Jansky will also perform at the concert.
“The idea to create a performance is simple, in that, modern dance is a performing art. It is meant to be shared,” Gash said.
“The audience will hopefully go away excited about what they experienced,” she said. “The intent is to educate audiences [who may not be familiar with modern dance] that dance is an art form-not just a routine, exercise or an entertaining activity.”
Stotler said that the three-year-old dance department is small and young-but growing. The first student modern dance concert last year, entitled “An Evening of Beginnings,” demonstrated the students’ efforts to the SLU community. Stotler added that rehearsal time extends beyond classtime; students must often dedicate extra hours to work on their projects.
“The work of a dancer or choreographer is a lifelong pursuit,” Gash said, “which constantly requires work, dedication, inspiration and passion. I think you will find these qualities represented in the evening’s work.”
The recital will be held on Tuesday, Dec. 7 at 7 p.m. in Xavier Hall Theatre.
