Melissa Clapp drags Madison Owen across the flour-strewn floor to keep Owen from winning the race. They run and push and dance around the stage to create the fastest batch of cookies.
This is Clapp’s bake-off vision, evoking all the competitive emotion of professional sports.
“My original source was baking, so I evolved it into a bake-off,” Clapp, a junior in accounting and the choreographer of the piece “For Best Results,” said. “It shows the competitive nature of cooking, and how people always want to be the best.”
Clapp’s piece is a duet between herself and Owen, a sophomore in textile and apparel management, and it is her first time choreographing.
“For Best Results” is part of the Dance Program’s fall concert showcases the work of student choreographers preformed by students.
“The concert is a project,” Robin Harris, the program director, said. “It is a collaborative project of performance skills and the classroom.”
Seven dances compose the concert, including the “Postcard Dances,” which the students created together while learning about choreographing rules.
Choreography is a five-part process that includes the source, vocabulary, development, structure and content. Each student began with an idea, such as Clapp with baking, and then they choose the vocabulary they want to use to convey the idea. The development stage adds sensory perspective and meaning, and the last two stages work on the physical dancing.
“The students all personalize the rules of composition,” Harris said. “But they deviate appropriately and as necessary to express what they need to express.”
The postcard dances follow a collection of vacation postcards. They begin with a line of girls swaying their hips with big grass skirts, and progress through a spinning surfboard and a line of lounge chairs.
For the majority of the girls, the concert shows their first attempts at choreographing — leading to everything from 18th-century etiquette lessons to the anxiety of waiting for a loved one.
They expressed their visions in solos or duets, but second-timer Lauren Grove created a dance involving five of the girls.
Grove, a junior in environmental sciences, choreographed a piece about vision that ties together movement, flashlights and an excerpt from The Book of Urizen by William Blake.
“It is about not being able to see clearly,” she said. “The dancers are blindfolded with flashlights and they are reacting. It is about trying to find something but not looking correctly.”
Grove’s theme parallels the difficulties of choreographing — attempting to portray through vision what is normally done by words.
“It is hard to get people to feel what you are trying to say,” Groves said.
The students have help for the difficulties of choreographing from the director, Harris, and the new assistant director, Autumn Belk.
“I love my work with the students,” Belk said. “I really enjoy being able to choreograph and teach.”
In addition to helping students find their own rhythm, Belk is also offering two special performances in the concert. One, entitled “Dinner,” is a duet she wrote about a couple fighting over dinner.
She said the importance of body movements in dance as what can lead the audience to understand the choreographer’s purpose.
“I was really thinking about communication styles and how that really affects a relationship,” Belk said. “So that is the idea when I created the piece and the movement.”
Dance is about movement, and the concert is an opportunity for students to experience the interpretive creations of their peers, according to Harris. She said the creations that are all individual and meant to speak about the emotions everyone feels.
“Each student truly has a unique vision,” Harris said. “And they are putting it in a form that can communicate to audiences.”
