Exposure to an eclectic range of rhythm and movement keeps Stanford dancers on their toes.
"You need to see a lot of different work to loosen up your ideas about how dance is made," says Diane Frank, a lecturer in the dance division. "Otherwise, you might think, 'All good dancers face front, all good dance is made to music I know, and it's all in unison.'"
The American College Dance Festival is just the place to shake up those notions. Held at the University of New Mexico from March 7 to 10, the marathon of dawn-to-dusk classes -- in ballet, jazz, tap, modern, hip-hop, tai chi and maybe even wushu sword dancing -- will bring together some 400 students from 40 schools. Following evening concerts that stretch toward midnight, judges discuss the strengths and shortcomings of each work with the dancers and the public audience.
Frank, who used to teach with Merce Cunningham in New York City, and dance lecturer Robert Moses auditioned students in October and chose three pieces that showed the most promise and the clearest intention. They mentored the projects by offering suggestions about choreography, but mostly they let the artistic pots simmer on their own.
Shibani Patnaik, '03, rehearses Essence of the East in the basement of Casa Zapata several nights a week, moving to the drumbeats of music that was specially composed for the festival by teachers she has studied with, on summer vacations in India, since she was 4. "When I tried out, mine was the only ethnic dance," Patnaik says. "It gives me a real sense of fulfillment to be keeping up with my cultural heritage by being able to perform."
Graduate student Brittany Brown comes to Recollection from the "little bit here, little bit there" school of training. "Instead of staying focused, I went berserk," she says. Dancing to an arrhythmic composition for guitar, cello and banjo, Brown is challenging ballet's traditional male-female lifts by choreographing a work in which she and her dance partner, Emma Stewart-Teitelbaum, take turns lifting each other.
Noelle Thomas, '02, who has been dancing since the age of 2, is taking Haywire -- a six-minute piece with "serious conflicts" -- to the festival on her second visit. She says she learned to look at dance with new eyes last year, thanks to the adjudicators' comments. "I'd see a piece and react viscerally -- like 'yuck.' But the judges, who were professionals and had been dancing for years, were so articulate and could find really constructive things to say."
