By Nick Pantages
@nick_pantages22
Three Springfield College seniors held a dance concert on Friday night, March 22, in Judd Gymnasia. Angelina Cohen, Nicole Henkel and Sydney Schwartz collaborated with a team of choreographers to perform “Chasing Furtherance.”
For the three dancers, organizing this event was no easy task.
“Syd, Nicole, and myself began planning and organizing this event at the end of our junior year with the help of our advisor, Sarah Zehnder,” Cohen said.
Once they figured out their idea for the concert, the three seniors held auditions for the choreographers to collect their whole team for the event.
After that, they began to prepare for the concert, which was a very stressful task.
“It required constant communication and planning throughout the last two semesters,” Cohen said. “There are just many moving parts that take place behind the scenes.”
However looking back at it, the experience was a positive one for Cohen and her crew.
“As three seniors, learning how to organize an event like this was a new experience for us, and an amazing learning process that’s given us many skills for our future dance careers,”
Cohen said.
After all the planning had been completed and Judd had been turned into a theater, it was finally time to perform.
The three dancers each had different themes prioritized during the dance. To help her prepare to be a professional dancer, Cohen worked with three choreographers, David Dorfman, Sarah Zehnder and Cynthia Duran, who all created completely new works for her. Therefore, Cohen was able to work with the trio to help them research what worked best for their new projects.
Henkel’s goal was to spread her powerful messages of intensity and strength through a variety of forms of dance, including contemporary and tap dance.
Schwartz’s message during her concert was to spread the complexities of birth, life and death. One of the ways Schwartz was able to accomplish this was through a playing of news clips from June and July of 2020, when the Black Lives Matter protests were taking place.
The end result of all this complex planning, practicing and performing was an elegant dance concert, in which each of the three dancers, along with their team of choreographers, accomplished all their goals.
At least for Cohen, the end result was more than worth all the hard work.
“I was pushed in so many ways, mentally, physically, and emotionally,” Cohen said. “It was truly a pleasure to work with everyone, and I’m incredibly grateful that they all dedicated so much time and effort to help support my growth as a dancer.”
Photo Courtesy Springfield College