From UMBC Magazine Winter 2012, The Coolest Jobs You Never Knew Existed at UMBC, featuring accompanist Ferd Maisel. Video by Meredith Purvis.
]]>This week the Arbutus Patch highlighted Baltimore Dance Project’s upcoming 30th anniversary performances as the first concerts to be held in the Performing Arts and Humanities Building Theatre. The article also mentions UMBC Dance faculty and company directors, Carol Hess and Doug Hamby, as well as dances to be performed by UMBC Department of Dance Instructor and Baltimore Dance Project principle dancer, Sandra Lacy.
Read “Dance Performances to Celebrate Baltimore Dance Project Anniversary”.
Baltimore Dance Project is a dance company that focuses on visually stunning and complex inter-disciplinary and collaborative works. Performances will be held February 7-9 at 8pm each evening. Find out more information about the program and the company through the Arts and Culture Calendar.
]]>Angel Chinn, Dance ’08, was featured in The Gazette this month when the newly formed dance company, NonaLee Dance Theatre, was slated to perform an adventurous, site-specific program at Joe’s Movement Emporium in Mount Rainier. In the article, Angel Chinn speaks about her switch from competitive running and studying education, to pursuing a degree in dance at UMBC with an honesty and openness that is mirrored in her performance which featured movements about life questions, faith and hope.
The NonaLee Dance Theatre, created and directed by Angel Chinn was developed in 2011, with the intention of striving to give dancers with diverse backgrounds the “opportunity to perform and grow artistically.” The dance troupe has evolved since its induction, but always aims to bring its own identity to the world of modern dance. This most recent performance was a “fresh take on modern dance and something people haven’t seen yet. It has a modern feel, it also has a hip hop feel, it has a funk feel.” NonaLee blurred “the line between audience and performer” by leaving the stage and performing in close proximity to the viewers in the museum lobby in a piece called “The Living Art Museum”.
Angel Chinn will return to UMBC to perform in the 2013 Baltimore Dance Project February 7-9. Read the entire article, including Associate Professor of Dance, Doug Hamby’s comments on Chinn’s dance at Gazette.net.
]]>Josephine Kalema, a senior dance major, will have her piece Past, Present, and Future performed at the Washington, D.C. performance space Dance Place as part of the annual New Release Choreographer’s Showcase this coming July.
It will feature dancers Arnesha Reives, Jonique Holcomb, Alexis Renee, Candice Grace, and Jasmynn Speight, and mixes traditional and modern African dance. Kalema dedicates Past, Present, and Future to her Ugandan family, as well as “every culture that has gone through life changing barriers,” according to Dance Place’s website.
The dates for the New Release Choreographer’s Showcase are July 7th at 8 p.m., and July 8th at 7 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at Dance Place’s webpage for the event, located here.
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From UMBC Magazine Winter 2012, The Coolest Jobs You Never Knew Existed at UMBC, featuring accompanist Ferd Maisel. Video by Meredith Purvis.
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Like any campus, UMBC is a blur of movement when school is in session. But when that motion is concentrated, studied, refined or performed – it can become truly special. UMBC’s Dance Department is the core of that activity, blending the grit of classes and rehearsal with the grace of performance. But the celebration of dance is not confined to classrooms or concert halls. At UMBC dance is contagious, filling up The Commons, the RAC and even Beuys Sculpture Park with the beauty of bodies in motion.
REBECCA M. JUNG ’87
In a master class for UMBC students, Rebecca M. Jung ’87, dance, wants dancers to think in shapes. “I see line and design,” she says, helping students assemble geometries of movement. “I call this sculpture garden. Let’s sculpt!”
Jung brings insights from her work with the innovative Pilobolus Dance Company to the class – and an insistence on persistent effort. “Try again,” she says after one droopy run-through. “I haven’t seen 100 percent with you guys yet!”
But as the students finally put the shapes in motion with grins and grimaces, Jung also smiles and exclaims: “The sculptures start to move. They become kinetic!”
— Richard Byrne ’86
Photo by Chris Hartlove
A group of modern dance students are still stifling Monday morning yawns as Carol Hess, professor of dance, leads them through a series of flowing rolls, reaches, swoops and spins that grow in intensity and complexity.
“Let’s clarify,” Hess says suddenly. And under her gaze and instruction, the students wrestle their bodies into shapes and movements that tell stories. Motions that were simple and tentative at the beginning of class now blossom into creative expressions. In repetition, the students grow in grace and confidence and speed.
Hess nods with approval, urging her students on as they move: “Travel, travel, travel!”
— Richard Byrne ’86
Photo by Chris Hartlove
At UMBC, ballet class is not the stuff of Degas, all pink tutus and tightly-wound buns. The students wear rainbow knee socks. One has the outline of a swallow behind her elbow. There’s a small square of injury tape on the wall that reads: “I 
UMBC Dance.”
But the movement here is all ballet: a wonder of balance, of shape, of discipline. A pianist plays Mozart as lines of students spin into pirouettes. The air between the mat and the landing of a perfect grand jeté feels timeless somehow. And the swallow appears to fly.
— Jenny O’Grady
Photo by Chris Hartlove
The thrills and grace of circus acrobats was the center of Mystique – a piece choreographed by Meghan Alokonis ’11 at the Senior Dance Concert. Inspired by Cirque du Soleil and entwined with classical ballet, six dancers spun in a flying swirl of colors – neon greens and purples and pinks. Their leaps and poses, splits and arabesques, were accompanied by the dizzying and enchanting music of the carnival.
— Derek Roper ’11
Photo by Enoch Chan
The UMBC Fall Dance Showcase is held in simple space, a dream-like emptiness that invites the audience to join in the act of creation, and imagine themselves in more deft and graceful limbs. Colored lights fade and revive as dancers run, jump and slide in their glow. We fill in blank spaces, tell our own silent stories. Too soon, the lights go black and we re-enter the waking world. The dancers, now all grins and heaving chests, take their bows as we applaud.
— Meredith Purvis
Photo by Enoch Chan
The heavy bass beat of a Dance-a-Thon for charity leaks out even before you arrive at the University Center. And you need that beat; the idea is to dance all night, from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m.
No one here is conserving energy yet. At one moment, breakdancers drop to the floor in an eye-blurring display of movement, feet flying. Then a group of six or seven dancers, moving in unison, forms a diagonal line that dominates the dance floor before it is submerged by the crowd and the music and cheers.
— Emma Marston ’11
Photo by Erin Ouslander ’03
In Thirty Oaks, a piece performed in the Beuys Sculpture Park, the dancer’s stage opens up around her. Autumn moss caresses her heel. A gray oak trunk is a maypole to arched back and wind-strewn hair. A rock is a fulcrum for her moving body. The soil works itself into the seams of her evolving costume, her fingers plunge root-like into mulch.
A tree branch snaps against her, a natural staccato. She smiles, and a ray of sunshine peeks through the leaves like a spotlight. Dance can happen anywhere.
— Jenny O’Grady
Photo by Erin Ouslander ’03
At Homecoming this year, UMBC’s Dance Team had to tweak its choreography mid-routine to squeeze all 22 dancers onto the The Commons’ Main Street. But the team’s dancers – who often take Retriever Fever out of the RAC to pep rallies, fundraisers and campus events – are old hands at tight fits. “We performed inside the bookstore once,” says co-captain Meghan Alokonis ’11. “We were trying not to knock down the mugs!”
— Chelsea Haddaway
Photo by Michelle Jordan ’93
Hip hop is all about flow. Intensity. From the emcee to the beats to the movement that the music inevitably creates. And when the rhythm kicks in, campus dance troupe Major Definition brings flow and intensity anywhere they throw down – in the RAC, in The Commons (where they perform and teach classes) and in contests like the East Coast Dance Competition, which the group won in 2009.
— Richard Byrne ’86
Photo by Melissa Van der Kaay