Author: Lauren Taylor
From the wall-sized mural in the Tiger Cooler to the enthusiasm of students soliciting tickets daily outside the Marketplace, it is all but impossible not to notice when Occidental’s dancers showcase their skill in the annual Dance Production.
The student-run showcase of a variety of dances, from belly dancing to hip hop to jazz, seems to outdo itself in size, skill and excitement every year.
Two crowds of over 900 students, professors, family members and alumni packed Thorne Hall last Friday and Saturday night, as Dance Production lived up to its billing as one of Occidental’s most anticipated events of the year.
Audience members buzzed with eager enthusiasm as the curtain raised on the first of the show’s 16 acts. The following two-hour parade of talented performers rewarded the excited audience.
Dance Production’s co-president Chris Monteath (junior) choreographed the high-energy opening act that set the tone for the performance.
His piece, entitled “Crash,” mixed hip hop and funk while featuring popular songs like LMFAO’s “Sexy And I Know It,” a remix of Leona Lewis’ “Collide” and M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls.”
“I [always] try to get a mood or a feeling across in my choreography,” Monteath said. “The intro [for “Crash”] was a techno-beat song, and that was to set up the mood for the rest of the dance. I wanted to give it this dance club music feel and bring in this mysterious aura. I knew people would love it and my dancers would love dancing to it.”
Following what has become somewhat of a trend among recent Dance Production performances, the show boasted a wide cultural scope. A Bollywood themed dance, choreographed by Marisha Thakker (sophomore), inspired some of the loudest applause of the night, with performers skipping in the aisles near the end of the dance and the music.
The popular Jamaican Dancehall, a style which was also performed last year, was a hit in choreographer Jordie Ho-Shue’s (senior) “Bus Anoda Shot.” Ho-Shue incorporated several traditional reggae titles, as well as Beyonce’s “Run the World,” into the fast-paced performance to “highlight the irony of self-repressed female sexual identity,” Ho-Shue said.
While the tight lines of every dance and the fancy footwork of the performers delighted the crowd all night, much of the energy in Thorne stemmed from the audience’s appreciation of the amateur production-students choreograph and perform their own dances with fellow students whose dancing backgrounds and experience vary greatly.
Junior Tim Chang’s pop-jazz piece, “Grateful to be Broken,” included many dancers who had no experience prior to joining Dance Production.
“My dance has some people who have been dancing for nine years and some people who have never danced at all,” Chang said. “The cool part is incorporating all ranges of talents.”
Former Occidental Dance Production Executive Board co-president MacKenzie Israel-Trummel ’09, agreed. “Every year, a significant portion of the dancers have never been onstage before,” she said. “I think the incredible variation in dance and performance experience actually strengthens the club and the performance.”
Although some dancers stood out individually, the audience was hard pressed to identify the difference between the experienced performers and those who had never danced before training for this performance.
“They all definitely looked really advanced,” audience member Julia Kingsley (first-year) said. “I didn’t actually know that most of them were beginners. I was very impressed with their dancing-those were some hard moves.”
Each dance had a four minute time restriction, but choreographers and dancers alike poured countless hours of creativity and practice into every available second.
Chang estimates it took him at least 20 hours to choreograph his dance. “For dance pro I usually choreograph in the summer-it never happens over a day. And I never stick with choreography the way I first intended it to be; it always changes and evolves.”
With roots for the event tracing back to at least the 1940s, when it was known as Dancing Paws, Dance Production has also tried to change and evolve to reach a broad audience while incorporating a diverse set of dances.
“[Dance Production] is a huge event every year, but every year becomes a bigger deal,” Monteath said. “And we keep adding new things. This year we added a video after the intermission, and we’d also never had finale dance [which brought all of the dancers onstage at the same time for the final performance] until a few years ago.”
In addition, this year’s production saw a record number of Occidental students participate. The show included over 250 dancers alone, according to Monteath. For Chang, it was well worth the effort to work with everyone in the group and to put on this year’s performance. He took great pleasure in the growth of his dancers throughout the process.
“I always try and inspire people and push them,” he said. “And the best part is seeing someone who has never danced before really indulge in dance and come out of this experience having dance as something they really enjoy.”
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