The dancers lit up the stage and poured their passion into every movement for the audience. Eastfield’s faculty members took the audience behind the scenes of developing and processing their pieces together.
“The fundamental thing about my work — and what is at the heart of everything — is that my work is collaborative,” Dr. Danielle Georgiou said. “It is the people that I work with, it is their stories and coming together to find the concept, idea and the spark that we want to follow as a group. That is the journey we go on together that makes my pieces be brought to life. While we perform on stage it feels fully embodied because it is for us, and that translates to the audiences in many beautiful ways because they can see themselves on stage. The piece that I created for the dance faculty concert is called ‘Golden Apperation’ and it’s about cowboys. It has the idea of cowboys and a sunset with the idea of desire and that mirage you see in a distance and what could be in the future and if it’s real. It is an exploration of a joyful experience all through a cowboy.”
“Life events,” Roberto Alvarez said when talking about the inspiration for his piece. “My dad recently passed this semester, then the opportunity to create something came up and I wanted to make something about that. I don’t usually talk about my dances. I like to give the audience a blank slate and they get to decide what it means. The dance is titled ‘Lies Our Fathers Told Us.’”
Alvarez enjoyed working with their friend because of a specific movement quality and rawness that comes out of that collaboration. “There were a lot of intense stares with each other in terms of contact,” she said. “We played with skin level and bone texture, so there’s light touch, deep touch and that hard touch as well.”
“The story is a representation of me having that slow dance with my dad that I am never gonna have, that slow dance with the child who was afraid growing up and a slow dance with another person who was going through the same things as myself. It is two people acknowledging each other that they are not alone, and that it is going to be okay.”
“With ‘Golden Apperation’ it all started with bringing back ideas that me and Danielle already had worked on,” Puentes said. “In the creative process we all pitch in ideas; it works like a puzzle.”
A piece of advice was shared by the dancers.
“Follow your gut,” Puentes said. “Don’t let people influence your decision, specifically the ones that say that you can’t make a living out of art because you can — you just have to stick with it.”
“Keep trying,” Alvarez added. “You’re doing this because you want to do it and, hopefully, you enjoy it. Comparing yourself to others is not going to get you anywhere. Everyone has their own mission in dance. Not everyone wants to be a performer and, even if they do, there
