Dance, Dance, Dance: A Little Behind-the-Scenes on the Upcoming Showcase
The Spring Theater and Dance Showcase is Thursday, May 19th at 6:30pm in the Riley Center for the Performing Arts.
Dance teacher Claudia Shell-Raposa and her students have been working on retaining skills, executing and cleaning choreography and technique, musicality, spacing, formations, stage presence, stamina, protocols, entrances, exits and intention. 23 students will be performing five dance pieces, including Broadway theater dance, lyrical, contemporary, classical pointe, and hip hop.
I wanted to take this opportunity to ask some dance students about their experience with the dance program at BBA–to learn a little more about what goes on behind the scenes.
The dancers have learned the choreography and are now down to the wire with practicing, cleaning up their moves, and making sure it all looks as perfect as they can make it! Lily Hickey ‘22, notes that, “We practice nearly every day at school for at least half of a class period; where we hear ‘Ok, let’s run it one more time’ seven times.”
While the final performance is super exciting, Charlotte Swenor ‘22 says: “it's [extra] rewarding [for dancers] because then we can really see just how much work we've put into it.”
They will be performing “Crunchy Granola” by Bob Fosse; a student choreographed new work, “Tide”, by Christina Czechel ‘23; and new work, Rhythm nation, by Emily Owens ‘12.
Lily says, “I love the calming intensity of dance–you work so hard at something, it exhausts you, and sometimes it even injures you, but every day you just want to work harder and harder at it. For some reason, going into class every day and working gives me peace, it calms my mind, and makes me happy.”
Good luck to all of the performers!
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