Press Room
Breaking Bounds Student DAnce Concert
For Immediate Release: November 27, 2007
(Southern Utah University, Cedar City, Utah) The SUU Theatre Arts and Dance Department will present Breaking Bounds, a student dance concert, December 5-8, at 7:30 p.m. in the Auditorium Theatre on the SUU Campus. This evening of dance offers new works by emerging student choreographers who push the edge of their own creative boundaries through their art form.
The student dance concert features the choreography of thirteen Theatre arts and Dance students: Cassandra Averill, Barbara Ball, Andrea Curtis, Kellie Duncan, Katherine Goodell, Ariel Grotegut, Katie Fernandez, Kara Johnson, Gwen Jensen, Saki Kawakita, Jessie Metcalf, Lexie Southworth.
Three weeks into the fall semester, the SUU Theatre Arts and Dance faculty chose the thirteen pieces from an audition selection of twenty-one student choreographed dances. Over the next two months, the student choreographers worked with faculty mentors and continued to refine their work. Two choreographers comment on their process.
Saki Kawakita, President of Orchesis, SUU’s student dance club, has two pieces in the student dance concert. In the first piece, inspired by a photograph of a single person calmly standing amidst a rushing river of big-city pedestrians, Kawakita drew ideas from her own experiences growing up in Osaka, Japan. A large ensemble work, Kawakita found working with eighteen dancers an enormous challenge. In her piece, she interweaves trios, quartets, group sections and solos to evoke the feeling of “Chaotic Calm”, both the feeling she derived from the photo and the title of her new work.
In her second piece, Kawakita works with nine dancers, elastic and black lighting to create unique movements and shapes without emotion. Kawakita, “In this piece, I am trying to coordinate theatrical aspects with dance performance. It will be visually fun to watch.”
Jessie Metcalf, in her second year choreographing for the student dance concert, met her own challenge by completely changing the dynamic of her movement vocabulary from last year. “With this experience I stepped away from what I learned was expected in competition-oriented choreography and strived to explore movement that would create an emotional response in the audience.”
Guided by improvisation and organic development, student choreographers are encouraged to break-through their own limitations to create original work, reflecting their creative spirit and intention. Through rhythm, dynamics, and risk, this year’s concert proves to be a highly athletic investigation into new frontiers of performance.
Tickets are available in advance at the ticket office 435-586-7878 and at the door, and are $10 for General Admission, $8 for SUU Faculty and Staff, $5 for with a non-SUU student ID, and Free for SUU Students with a valid SUU I.D
For more information call 435-865-8800 or go online to www.suu.edu/arts