Dance Company evokes emotions with dance

Most cannot get past childhood memories of the Nutcracker and women dressed up like ballerinas in pink tutus, possibly even performed on ice, when they think about the art of dance. And while that is an undeniable part of the dance world, there is so much more to the act of dancing than just jumping and costumes. This is something that N.C. State’s Dance Company has always strived to prove, being an organization of students lead by skilled choreographers in the art of modern dance.

“We focus more on strictly modern dance and the performance aspect of it and the learning how to make dances that really mean something. We do it, not just for the sake of making a pretty dance, to put together different emotions and different concepts,” Sarah Griner said, a senior in textile and apparel management and one of the choreographers for the NCSU’s Dance program. This Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m. in Stewart Theater, members of NCSU’s Dance Company will be performing a series of student choreographed pieces of modern dance.

“The concert is mostly made up of choreography by current students as well as alumni from the company,” Griner said. “And it also includes a piece made by all the members of the company together, Anthem.

One of Griner’s partners in choreography, Ashley Walls, a sophomore in mathematics, elaborated.

“The Movement Studies is a project that we do annually,” Walls said. “What we do, it’s really interesting in how it evolves, is start out with a who, what, when and everyone has their own individual idea. [We] put together just a few counts of choreography and then we all come together and we try to find what they all have in common and everyone comes up with a theme. Overall, we had a World War II theme for women during that era and a lot of that material and gestural vocabulary came from war time posters. We broke [the pieces] into three groups, a boarding house, hospital and train station.”

Members of the NC State Dance Company, an academic organization requiring its members to take classes each year, are given the option of whether or not they wish to choreograph after being in the organization a year.

“It’s really interesting to have that kind of freedom,” Griner said. “And while our directors definitely give us a lot of suggestions or feedback, at the end of the day it’s still your piece.”

Griner’s piece, “To Remain Silent,” revolves around two people in an interrogation room, one a criminal with a secret, the other a detective trying to extract the truth. It’s a classic dilemma of what happens when you pit people against their inner demons, and to see it portrayed through the movements and actions of such skilled performers is something to behold.

Walls’ work, “Everything Prevents One,” is inspired by the words of Gertrude Stein and closes the distance between what can be said and what can be expressed in the emotion of human motion.

“It’s about [the performer] trying to become her own person but can’t because the other [two] dancers are trying to shape and mold her. They’re supposed to represent all the outside influences of the world,” Walls said.

Multi-award winning director of the N.C. State Dance Program, Robin Harris, whose work has been showcased from here to the John F. Kennedy Center, is closing out the evening’s performance with her latest work, “Wait for me here,” whose performers include Raleigh Dance Theater Assistant Director, Megan Marvel and J. Mark Scearce, head of the Music Department.

What is phenomenal about these works is the depth of thought and expression that so many performers find in the language of the human body, or as Griner put it, “Dancing, for me, is the way I’m able to express myself. Words stop short a lot of the time, but dance is a way to really get that emotion and message across.”

While dance is something we all know about, dance like this is something we can do more than know. It’s something to experience, to be talked about. It opens the mind up to a side of art that has a lot to offer and even more to be appreciated.