Dance students celebrate Fall Dance Festival
On Thursday and Friday, University of Nevada, Reno dance students will showcase their talents alongside professional dancers from Element Dance Theater in San Francisco and the Bell? Contemporary Dance Company at the Fall Dance Festival.
The festival will be held in the Nightingale Concert Hall in the Church Fine Arts Building at 8 p.m. each night. Tickets are $15 for adults, $13 for students and $10 for seniors and children.
“We’re going to showcase everything that is offered at UNR — ballet, modern, jazz,” University Dance Program Director Barbara Land said. “We’re going to really show off our students.”
The dances presented in the festival will feature choreography from university faculty members, guest choreographer Kristen Heavy and selected dance students who auditioned their own work.
“There is a very strict audition process,” Land said. “Our audition was held during the first week of school in August. They’re required to practice two or three times a week on campus. It’s a lot of hard work. This is really the cream of our crop, our really advanced dancers.”
The university dance program hopes to provide a variety of dance for its audience, in both its fall student-based performance and an upcoming performance during the spring, which will feature more professional dancers.
“There are a large number of students who may have only one experience with dance in their lives and we want to make it a good experience,” Land said.
While the Fall Dance Festival is an important event for university art students, it also has been increasing in popularity within the Reno community.
“We’ve got community members who look forward to it all year,” Land said. “UNR is a great place and the arts are very strong here. We take the arts very seriously. We have a lot of people here that love what they do.”
Land and others in the dance program, hope the Fall Dance Festival reaches out to students and other members of the UNR community to illustrate the strengths of their program.
“We have a very strong school of arts here,” she said. “Arts are alive on campus.”
Casey O’Lear can be reached at colear@nevadasagebrush.com.
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