Yolanda Pauly
This past week, from March 6-8, COMPANYDANCE performed their Spring Dance Concert in Kelsey Theater. Their varied performances encouraged the audience to consider relevant topics of our time, from the relationship between nature and human creation to the contributions of those who came before us.
COMPANYDANCE is a company within the dance department aimed at providing students with a “pre-professional repertory dance company experience,” which utilizes a broad variety of dance forms while encouraging student creativity.
COMPANYDANCE affirmed this mission through their performances, which ranged from duets, solos, and ensembles, and touched on topics of mental health, joy, and surveillance culture.
One of the most creative pieces of the night was “Pixel and Pulse,” directed by Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Brianna Rae Johnson. The piece opened with the dancers standing on a line onstage, with one holding a camera out toward the crowd, so that the audiences’ faces were projected on the screen behind them. The interspersed sounds of uneasiness from the audience perfectly captured what the piece was trying to confront: how we change when our lives are almost constantly captured on camera, and where we can find escape from a world saturated with technology. Throughout the dance, the performers were filmed, sometimes up close and sometimes as a group; sometimes the dancers would perform together, and sometimes they would disperse across the stage, dancing on their own.
“Elation,” choreographed by guest artist Kyle Marshall and performed at the end of the concert, was a feel-good ensemble, with performers grinning as they danced, adorned in colorful pastels. “It was our best performance,” Nina Hodder ’26, one of the dancers, said. “It is hard to get the timing right on that piece, but we did it here. There was a lot of eye contact, so you could see and feel the joy shared between all the dancers.”
While there was no overarching theme of the concert, COMPANYDANCE Artistic Director Heather Klopchin explained that “faced with present realities, we offer dance as a space for liberation, a testament to the strength of diverse voices and bodies, and a vital form of resistance and joy for all.” Through the students’ and department’s unwavering commitment to face and present hard topics through their collection, they truly did embody and share “resistance and joy.”COMPANYDANCE’s Spring Concert highlights thought-provoking student performances