Angelica Babiera | Arts Editor
Featured image: York’s third-year Performance and fourth-year Choreography classes created a series of dances that centralizes on self-expression. | Angelica Babiera
As the lights darken, the seats fill up and all sounds in the theatre diminish, the audience anticipates the first dance with hushed excitement. They’re eager to see their fellow classmates, friends, family members and fellow York community members on stage to perform a dance created by the newest full-time faculty member, Freya Olafson.
Performing at the McLean Performance Studio on November 23 to 25, the third-year Performance and fourth-year Choreography classes performed Dance Innovations: Up Rising.
The performances reflects the artistry and integrity of the York students, faculty, and staff. It is dedicated in loving memory to Professor Emerita, Penelope Reed Doob and alumna, Selina Margaret Twum. Up Rising features original new dances created by York students and faculty of all levels in the Dance program.
Olafson borrowed methods from her work over the past ten years to guide students in their performances. “I used methods to generate movement material from my various works over the past 10 years, AVATAR, HYPER_CPA [Consistent Partial Attention], in order to guide students through a collaborative process. The work emerges as a movement study that engages the mutability of the individual performers in relationship to ideas of and self-expression in the digital world.”
The entirety of the performance emphasizes the cycle of the ups and downs in life. Each piece has its own unique and innovative choreographic structure that captures the essence of raw, human experiences—how to cope with our own struggles, while simultaneously trying to get back up.
Up Rising: Series A consists of nine pieces in the span of an hour and a half. These short dances all encompass the passion and dedication the students and faculty poured into these performances. From themes of grounding their own self-expressions in the digital world in the first piece, “Being and Becoming,” to believing the negative thoughts in their minds in the seventh piece, “Apperception,” there’s a dance that can speak to all of us on a deeper level.
“We have had weekly rehearsals to create and prepare the work for performance: every Wednesday and Friday, for two hours. Although this is the time we work together in studio, there are many more hours outside of studio for me in preparation for the work,” Olafson explains.
“The piece was completely assembled as of November 15. After that date, we started to rehearse it to make it strong, and integrated throughout the 12-minute work.”
“Our student choreographers delved into a wide range of concepts and subject matter with curiosity, daring, wit, and rigor; igniting and directing generous interpretations of their creative imaginings,” says Julia Sasso, the Artistic Director of Dance Innovations 2017.
Up Rising: Series A showed a strong fury throughout the dances, demonstrating the challenges that one faces with self-identity and the restrictions of social conventions. Olafson intuitively choreographs these innovative and raw performances, capturing the essence of pain, happiness, and artificial emotions that all stem from the digital world. The audience feels this dramatically, marking the show’s remarkable success.
