UI Dancers Offer a “Feets-On” Lesson for G/T Students
Members of the University of Iowa’s Dancers In Company held a performance and workshop for students at Central Campus.
Dancers In Company is the touring repertory dance troupe from the University of Iowa. Twelve dancers, undergraduates and graduate students both, tour the Midwest every spring performing live concerts and workshops. The company trains dancers in performance and choreography while simultaneously emphasizing the importance of liberal arts education.
Which brings us to why the dancing dozen was onstage in the auditorium at Central Campus Monday.
The DMPS Gifted & Talented program has embarked this year upon a broadening of scope to include identification of students with promise in the visual and performing arts.
“Jessica Gogerty (Central Academy Director) reached out to the U of I,” said one of the district’s GT consultants, Karen Sissel. “There is a committee of us working on increasing services and opportunities for kids with artistic interests and potential. Dance is one area where the district’s home high schools haven’t been able to offer much,” she added, and she ought to know. Sissel’s previous assignment was five years as the drama director at Lincoln High.
After DIC delivered a vigorously moving performance that amounted to preaching to the choir, many in the audience hung around to join the dancers for a clinic on the basics. It started slowly, rather like a sports team warming up for a practice set to music. Gradually the line between arts and athletics got even blurrier and actual choreography to sultry tunes like Fever and celebratory ones from the musical Hairspray broke out where minutes before there had been only simple stretches and abdominal crunches.
Students were getting demonstrations on how to “walk with presence,” and “gallop steps.” In pretty short order they were moving more or less as one, like a kinetic chorus or an acting ensemble whose lines were their moves.
The floorboards on the auditorium stage squeaked beneath bare feet like a basketball court does beneath stopping-and-going sneakers. Choreographically challenged observers were reminded that dance worthy of observation is far more intricate than mastery of left vs. right and repeated count cadences ranging from 1-8 might imply. As an art form dance is a demanding fusion of mind and body.
“What we try to do with our touring performances to schools is incorporate a sample of everything from hip-hop to ballet,” said Charlotte Adams, an Associate Professor at Iowa and the DIC Director during a break between the company’s stylistically wide-ranging performance and the student workshop.
Part of the beauty of it is that if you’re not up to actually doing it you can just sit back, watch and appreciate.
