BYU-Idaho’s Dance Department is ready to host its Winter semester Dance Showcase. The Dance Showcase is an opportunity for the university’s talented dance majors to perform, learn and grow their choreography skills in a deep and meaningful way. Some of the dance genres incorporated in the show include ballet, jazz, contemporary, swing, hip-hop and more.
It is important to know that the Dance Showcase and so many other events alike, do not come together overnight. Everyone involved in the show’s production must make serious time commitments.
Diedre Sakota, an adjunct faculty member who has helped choregraph portions of the showcase, says rehearsals can be rigorous for the students who already have a full class schedule.
“Our rehearsals generally last three hours, and they meet two to three times a week for most of the students,” Sakota says. “It varies, professor to professor, I would say, and choreographer to choreographer. But sometimes it can be a slow process, sometimes it is a quick process, and then they edit and remove and add. It is an ongoing kind of creative collaboration, I would say with the students, as a choreographer, you present materials and then it's up to you to make the dancers look good.”
Sakota says she found inspiration for her explorative choreography piece from avian behavior.
“I just thought it'd be fun to explore kind of the quirky nature of birds,” she says. “That is where my idea started, then it grew into this process of how we communicate. The birds spend all their time communicating and to get the job done, to kind of figure out their area, their territory, what their roles are with each other. So, my piece started off as just something that I found interesting, which was birds.”
One of the unique qualities about this dance event is that students get to perform and collaborate with the Dance Department faculty. Mary Groenig, a dance major student in her senior year, says this event allows her to learn something about herself as an aspiring professional dancer.
“It's really cool, because as a student, we get to learn more about how we work as dancers, but not as just dancers, but as choreographers,” Groenig says. “So, learning from our professors, as we do every day, we get to learn our choreographic voices. As, a student, it's really nice to have this opportunity to work directly with the faculty to discover my own voice, in choreography.”
The Dance Showcase is Feb. 15 at 7:30 p.m. in the Hart Auditorium inside the Hart Building. Tickets for the event are available at the ticket office outside the Hart Auditorium or online at byui.edu/ticket-office/.