News: Best of College Dance 2010
Students excel on the Kennedy Center stage during the American College Dance Festival.
Over three nights in May, nearly 200 college dancers performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, as part of the American College Dance Festival Association. Thirty works (out of 431 that had been adjudicated during regional conferences) were showcased in the organization’s biennial national festival. Two students were selected to receive the ACDFA/Dance Magazine Award for Outstanding Student Choreographer and Outstanding Student Performer. Overall, the students showed technical mastery and artistry at a professional level, squelching any question about whether college is the best environment to develop a stage career.
Emily Terndrup received the Outstanding Student Performer Award for her part in a duet that she and Patrick Barnes created during their sophomore year at University of Utah. In Where Your Body Lies, Terndrup writhed and contorted her body around a reticent Barnes (whose quiet confidence was also notable) in a poignant nonverbal conversation to music by Takagi Masakatsu and Windy and Carl, with text by Margaret Atwood.
“There is quite a maturity to this relationship,” says Utah Associate Dean Brent Schneider. “This is not a young fall-in-love dance.” Schneider provided some coaching (along with lighting design and tech) once the piece was selected for ACDFA. In creating the final blackout cue, he notes Terndrup’s desire for the piece’s final moments to be visible, when she whispered in Barnes’ ear and then turned her face toward the audience. “That’s a mature image,” says Schneider, “inviting the audience to become part of the conversation that’s going into his ear.”
Outstanding Student Choreographer Award recipient Megan Kendzior created Witness as her senior thesis at the University of Florida. Using the haunting motif of four women standing with their arms in the air, Witness is performed beside a huge pile of shoes. Pairs of shoes line the stage in vertical rows as well. The work treats its difficult topic, the Holocaust, with remarkable subtlety and restraint.
Kendzior received a grant to visit Auschwitz to conduct research for her piece. “Megan is impacted by her own history,” says Associate Professor Kelly Drummond Cawthon. “Our curriculum is based on asking hard questions about what the arts can do for communities,” she says. “Megan got swept up by questions about her own lineage that she didn’t have answers for. We encouraged her to ask more questions. During the rehearsal process, there was as much talking as dancing—much time with books and journals.” Prior to the national festival, Kendzior and the performers (who collaborated in the choreography) took the work to Israel as part of a U.S.-Israel exchange program.
Two awards seemed inadequate for the quality level of this year’s festival, so the award panel (Sali Ann Kriegsman, Christopher K. Morgan and this writer) recommended that nine additional performers be officially recognized, and those names appear at www.acdfa.org. In addition, Politics Religion Sex from Minnesota State University and Dirty Up to The Knuckles, a duet by Sarah Konner and Austin Selden from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, were particularly enjoyable for their humor and fresh partnering work.
Truly, however, the best honor had already been delivered—the invitation itself to participate in the national festival. To perform in the nation’s capital at the Kennedy Center for an audience of peers in one of the 30 best works from a field of more than 400—that’s an achievement that speaks for itself.
Photo of University of Florida students performing in Megan Kendzior's witness, by Andy Howard, courtesy of University of Florida College of Fine Arts
