Madison Olandt, a second-year world arts and cultures/dance and psychology student, said her major has given her a sixth sense.
“We’ll take a class where we will all lay down and close our eyes, listening to our surroundings, or sit in Bruin Plaza and then make a dance out of the pedestrian gestures we observed,” Olandt said. “To (world arts and cultures/dance) majors, everything is choreography.”
Olandt said she channeled her love for movement when she decided to perform in Spring Sing and co-founded The Inner Sanctum, a 40-person dance group primarily comprised of world arts and cultures/dance students.
Her co-founder Nicholas Pauley, a second-year world arts and cultures/dance student, said the group’s name originated from a meditation workshop he attended.
“The definition of the inner sanctum is your truest self,” Pauley said. “When we dance, we don’t care about external factors, we just go into ourselves and allow our bodies to move.”
Pauley said he and Olandt settled on directing the piece two months before Spring Sing auditions and recruited dancers to start rehearsing three times a week in January.
He added that choreographing the group’s dance has been most challenging for the creators since the movements follow a story.
“It’s essentially a fairy tale about a wishing well,” he said. “So each step has to make sense to the progression of the story and we can’t just throw in a cool visual.”
Olandt said that a narrator guiding the audience through the performance distinguishes the dance and increases theatricality.
“We wanted to create something that nobody would expect and would subvert the audience,” Olandt said. “We didn’t want the choreography to be the natural first thing we thought of, so we had to sit down and talk about it.”
After Pauley choreographed a number featuring 30 dancers instead of the conventional 10 for “WACSmash’D,” the world arts and cultures/dance showcase, he said he realized the potential of bonding the department together through mass performance.
“A lot of dance teams on campus who practice late at night really get to bond,” Pauley said. “(World arts and cultures/dance) is a family, but now we have a grand finale where we can all perform together.”
The duo said they also see Spring Sing as a way to clear up preconceived notions about world arts and cultures/dance since the department has few performances and minimal recognition on campus.
“When people think of dance, they think hip-hop and dance teams, but that’s not what (world arts and cultures/dance) does,” Pauley said. “A (world arts and cultures/dance) performance is going to be experimental and sometimes uncomfortable, but we’re excited to show that we can also entertain a crowd.”