This year the dance season will be focusing on Dance on Film/Dance for the Camera. This initiative is both an exciting direction and solution for the pandemic period that requires us to social distance and think innovatively. Both Fall Dance Festival, our student driven performance series, and DanceTech, featuring work by faculty members, provide platforms for aesthetic dialogue and conversation. We, like theatre, are addressing the theme of The Personal and The Political and for both productions, encouraging student and faculty creators to explore site-specific ideas in their work – celebrating the cultural/architectural artifacts of Lubbock and West Texas. For Fall Dance Festival, for example, one of our students is exploring 5 and J and another, an empty parking lot by Broadway and Q in downtown Lubbock.

Exploring space on camera is a theme this semester. In my choreography class a couple of weeks ago, I brought in Mark Hofeling, production designer and art director of many movies over the years, including the High School Musicals and The Descendants, to share with my class how he creates environments for film and focuses space and choreography for the camera. This conversation was eye-opening to our students, introducing them to the meticulous attention to detail and the rigorous exploration of spatial ideas that dance on film requires.

To this end Mark Charney, Mallory Prucha and I reached out to the College of Media and Communication, specifically Assistant Professor, TJ Martinez, to explore the possibility of collaborating with his students in his classes to create dance films together. I have felt from the moment that I arrived at TTU that the College of Media and Communication was a natural artistic fit for Dance, and I have worked closely with faculty members TJ Martinez and Simon Parmley in the past. Both have been incredibly generous with their time and helped us to create unique PR material for Dance--either in video or photograph--and I am excited and hope to have our students work together as well in the Spring in preparation for DanceTech.

We are continuously trying to find new and innovative ways to engage our community and develop our audience potential; as such, we intend to present the Fall Dance Festival pieces in the Stars and Stripes Drive-In, and for the DanceTech pieces to be projected onto buildings downtown.