The Nevada Sagebrush

Student dancers participate in the Fall Dance Festival, which took place Thursday and Friday. The dancers performed pieces with University of Nevada, Reno faculty and guest dancers. Photo By Casey Durkin / Nevada Sagebrush.

From ballet to contemporary dance with stage lighting strapped to dancers’ heads, students performed a semester’s worth of work last week.

Fifteen pieces were performed Thursday and Friday by 38 dance students, dance faculty and guest dancers for an audience of about 500 people.

“It seems like I say this every year, but there is truly something for everyone in this show,” assistant professor of dance Cari Cunningham said.  “It’s a wide variety of work that runs the gamut from virtuosic and beautiful to strange and dynamic.”

Dancers performed to everything from classical to bongo music.  

Dance styles ranged from contemporary ballet to modern dance to lyrical jazz dance.   

“I think the show was the best we have ever done,” Director of Dance Studies Barbara Land said.  “Our students are becoming very sophisticated in the creation of their own choreographic works and their dancing is becoming very technically proficient.”

Ballet pieces included “Dance Macabre,” where dancers portrayed light and dark spirits, and “Raising the Barre,” which was performed and choreographed by Erica Maldonado and Stephanie Sanders.  Both dancers tried to show up one another as they danced both ballet and hip-hop.

“The one with the chairs was my favorite,” Kathy Gordon, a 24-year-old journalism major, said during intermission.  “The dancers were having a lot of fun and so was the audience.  It was very funny.”

“Chair(s),” set to Russian music, involved seven dancers and eight chairs as props.  The comedic dance involved the dancers choreographically moving chairs around the stage and trying desperately not to leave the eighth chair out.

Organizers were pleased with the way the event turned out.

“Watching (the students) grow as dancers makes me very excited about the future of our dance program,” Cunningham said.

Ashley Allen can be reached at news@nevadasagebrush.com.

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