Wednesday, April 15, 1998
Innovative show without bounds
lets producers spotlight talent
DANCE: Performers seek originality by rejecting conventional
trappings
By Vanessa VanderZanden
Daily Bruin Staff
Skinny chicks in tutus? Men in tights? Sorry, this dance
production gets a bit WAC-ier than that.
"We have some modern pieces, some with spoken text in them, we
have a hip-hop piece and we have a couple of cultural forms,"
explains Tracy Flint, co-producer of the world arts and cultures’
(WAC) student production, "Dance, Motion and Madness."
"We’re really just trying to get a good representation of what
goes on in this department. There’s so many different kinds of
things going on."
Showing Friday and Saturday night, "Dance, Motion and Madness"
will attempt to reveal students’ outside-of-class projects. The
free show (first come, first served) will include free cookies and
milk afterwards.
"We’ve really tried to make the show include stuff you wouldn’t
normally see," offers co-producer Amy Vaillancourt, as performers
rehearse body-grinding moves on the nearby stage. "We have an
Indian classical dance put to Tracy Chapman music. We have a
classical Javanese piece with costume and everything. We got a lot
of people who don’t usually show things involved."
Involving both undergraduates and graduate students, the show
makes stage space available to any world arts and cultures student
or master of arts (MA) student with a choreographed piece. However,
they have to have made the grade first – being hand selected from
one of the year’s previous Hand Made productions, student-produced
performances or coming out to the auditions. The competition got a
little hairy.
"We had 22 pieces and we had to narrow it down to nine," Flint
exhaustedly relates while rolling her eyes. "There were some
wonderful things, but we really tried to choose a cross-cut. We
wanted to get a good representation of what goes on in the
department."
While some pieces come directly from the Hand Made shows, others
have never before been viewed. Even the Hand Made works, which
often only take on the most basic of forms for the informal
production, are given new life with the proper technical aspects
and production techniques, which "Dance, Motion and Madness" can
afford. The performance is the only one of its kind at UCLA,
beginning just last year.
"The little Hand Made thing is just an opportunity to show what
you’ve been working on, and that can be outside of class, too,
except that it’s very informal," clarifies Flint, a first year
master of arts student in the WAC department. "It’s not produced,
there’s no lighting and they’re not necessarily developed pieces.
Sometimes they get a little long, wereas with this, we narrow it
down into something more."
While all of the choreographers must be involved in either the
WAC or MA department, the performers do not. For example,
choreographer and dancer Amy Henry, a second-year WAC student,
asked two of her roommates to join in her piece. Working on the
dance for a couple of months, the work looks as smooth as anything
performed entirely by dance students.
"A friend of mine in the department told me about the show,"
Henry explains. "We were talking about it, and decided that because
our department doesn’t have a lot of hip-hop representation, we
wanted to do that."
Likewise, Andria Miller chose to create a work which would
otherwise not be shown in standard UCLA performances. She creates a
six-minute improv piece, starting with spoken text and going from
there. No one knows exactly what she’ll bring to the stage either
Friday or Saturday night.
"Well, we trust her," Flint says with a chuckle. "What she did
for us at the audition night was fascinating, was different, so we
thought, OK. We’ll go there. We’ll try it. We’re still discussing
how it’s going to work in the concert itself."
Though Miller’s work will be somewhat of a ‘"fly by the seat of
your pants" deal, the rest of the production clearly will not.
Having begun planning for the show in the fall of this year, it has
taken the two undergraduate junior producers and two MA producers
this long to set up. While Flint receives two credits towards her
MA in education and Vaillancourt the same for her second-year MA in
ethnography, the work the two have put in quite surpasses the units
they will be receiving.
"We did everything from writing people personal notes to going
to classes to make announcements," relates Vaillancourt, a proud
grin stretching across her face.
Apparently, Flint finds it a worthwhile endeavor as well.
"We’re learning on the technical side, on the business side,
what needs to be done organizing it," Flint says. "And for me,
that’s kind of fun."
DANCE: The world arts and cultures department’s production of
"Dance, Motion and Madness" shows at 8 p.m. in the Dance Building,
Theater 200. Admission is free. For more information, call (310)
825-3951.