Over the course of the semester Alyssa Crump has been planning and practicing for about 10 hours a week: five hours in class and five hours out of class. She has been perfecting all the details of her final project, fixing and re-working certain aspects and coordinating dancers in preparation for the big night.
She is not alone. In Senior Dance Project, the final class for students on the creative dance track, Melodie Fais, Corrine Bates and Lauren Stafford have also been preparing their senior projects. The course prepares seniors for a performance to demonstrate the skills they’ve accumulated over the past four years. They have met twice a week since the beginning of the semester to coordinate the show and have been responsible for everything from selling ads to choreographing the dances and controlling the production.
“They each are making a piece of their own work that they run rehearsals and cast. Since their junior year they have been working on it and the class is about putting on the production itself,” said Lea Marshall, producer and assistant professor.
The ending result is “Calm,” which will be held at the Grace Street Theater Nov. 19 through 21 at 8 p.m. The seniors chose the theme of the show because the first letters of each of their first names spells calm, and this year they aimed to make the process less stressful than previous years. In line with that effort, they each created a piece that represented their idea of calm, Fais said.
“We just liked the idea of having this process be something that’s calm and not stressful because in the past, senior projects have been portrayed as something that could be stressful for us. Bates said “We liked that it was just four of us and we were all getting along and that it was going to be a calm situation.”
Bates’ piece, “Between Floors,” is about five people getting stuck in an elevator and all the emotions that could happen during that time. To demonstrate this on stage, the dancers will stay in one confined space the whole time, Bates said.
Crump took a different approach in “Technicolor Romance.” She draws inspiration from 1950s musicals and old Hollywood celebrities like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire in her choreography.
“I’m influenced a lot by them stylistically and I’m inspired by them in a theatrical sense; how their way of entertaining still kept the art form of dance while entertaining audiences at the same time,” Crump said.
Melodie Fais’ piece, “A Day Apart” explores the basic human need to touch and be touched. Fais said she uses a lot of partnering work to portray this concept on stage.
After being inspired by the architecture and atmosphere she encountered in Italy last summer, Lauren Stafford came up with “Scutura Degli Spazi,” which translates to “carving spaces” in Italian.
In years past, the dances have been followed by a video, showing baby pictures and the transformation of the students in the performance. However, this year the students decided to have a short video before each dance.
“The video kind of foreshadows our piece and what is to come. Usually at the end all the seniors have their own big film . we decided to do it a little differently; we decided to have our own video that represented our own selves through music,” Stafford said.
This performance will be the first time the seniors have choreographed a dance this small to be presented on stage.
“I feel like it’s more of a beginning than an ending. It’s been exciting being able to explore my own ideas for this project and it has excited me to explore more ideas,” Crump said.
Tickets for the show are $5 for VCU students and $10 for the general public. The show runs November 19-21 at the Grace Street Theatre. All shows begin at 8 p.m.