PROJECTS

PRESENTING AT THE FESTIVAL OF EXCELLENCE

In April of 2019 I presented on my choreographic process for Spring Awakening at SUU's annual Festival of Excellence. Bullet points of the presentation included:
- The process I went through to create the "Shadow Dancers" for our four leads, and how the Director and I decided to incorporate them.
- How the movement and design of each piece created an atmosphere for the audience that would help them understand the story and the emotion behind each number.
- The importance of taking context into account when choreographing musicals
- The importance of taking your actors abilities into account when choreographing, and playing to their strengths. 
-How, in a lot of cases, the goal of a choreographer is not to create the newest, most impressive material, but to communicate a point and make their dancers look good on stage.

CHOREOGRAPHING SPRING AWAKENING

This was the third time in my career where I simultaneously choreographed and performed in a production. In SUU's Second Studio production of Spring Awakening, performed in November of 2018, I not only choreographed every ensemble number in the show, but also choreographed lead numbers that would not usually require choreography. This is because the director wanted to enhance the telling of the stories by adding in, what we called Fantasy Dancers.  Each of the four leads (Wendla, Melchior, Moritz, and Isle) were assigned a shadow dancer that performed during pivotal musical numbers. This added an extra ~30 minutes worth of choreography for the fantasy dancers that would not have normally been in Spring Awakening. I was incredibly pleased with my work and with my finished product. I feel this production held some of my best work yet.

COSTUME BOOK FOR SNOW COLLEGE

In my last semester at Snow college (2016) I decided to create a costume book for the dance department. In my previous semesters, I noticed how messy and unorganized the costume room was. As a result, it was very difficult to find costumes or even know what costumes we owned. I got permission from our professor to use two days of class to take out the buckets and buckets of costumes and photograph them on our dancers. I borrowed a camera from a close friend and had the dancers help me write out descriptions and label boxes. After using the department's leftover money to print the pictures, I matched photo to description and put together a costume book. I added in a checkout sheet in the back for future students to keep track of the costumes being used.