A girl mimes the gesture of putting her pants on in her dance in order for her audience to understand the performance.

Members of the Choreography class performed in a show called Feats on the Floor on Thursday, March 14 and Friday, March 15. The show attracted a wide range of audience members, including parents, students and Headmaster Deborah Holman. Choreography teacher Lynn Modell introduced each dancer before the performances began.

Modell told the dancers to demonstrate pathway movements such as walking straight, zig-zagging and curving.  The dancers traced their feet on paper and followed the movements. Other demonstrations involved movement, while others had no motion in their performances.

Following the demonstrations, five students began a performance in which they either faced the audience or the wall behind them. The dancers exemplified various timings. One dancer, junior Aubrey Johnson, did a 10-second dance slowly, normally and fast. During this performance, it felt like the audience was being educated about the careful and meaningful work that was put into this dance. The performances showed the viewers the craft of dancing.

The following performance involved a duet of two dancers, Johnson and junior Gaby Germanos, whose goal was to use the same beginning and end while having totally different moves in the middle, as well as to demonstrate both light and strong movement. They began by mimicking each other then changed, but as the finale came they once again began to imitate the other dancer’s moves. Although no music was present during these dances, it felt as if the dancers were dancing to a nonexistent beat. Such a performance was refreshing to see, because most of the time a dance is accompanied along with some sort of music.

Sophomore Zephyr Straus chose two songs and created movements that were a minute long each. Straus performed the same dance routine for both of the songs. The first song that she used was “Kids” by MGMT. The other dance used the song “Magnificat” by Arvo Pärt. It was interesting to see the two contrasting songs accompanied by the same choreographic movement in the span of a minute.

Another interesting performance was when the dancers used four sentences written about them that were important and personal to create movements inspired by those words. They performed while reading the sentences. The dancers said a word then followed with dance movements and would continue on until they finished the performance. It was different to see bits and pieces of a sentence be used for a choreographic performance.

Overall this was a different and new experience, and it felt that the audience learned a lot from the performances of the dancers.

Ayan Noyan can be contacted at [email protected].