ARHS Dance Theatre Ensemble takes the stage

By Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on November 16, 2007

It's more than just dance, and it isn't exactly theater: It's Amherst Regional High School's Dance Theatre Ensemble. Once an afternoon club, it's now an official five-day-a-week class - one of the best classes some students have ever taken, to hear them tell of it.

This weekend, the ensemble will be hold public performances of "Reflection," a dance theater composition of a dozen or so pieces the students conceived and choreographed themselves.

Shows are Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m., in the ARHS auditorium. There will be a buffet potluck meal during intermission on Saturday and before Sunday's performance at 12:30 p.m. Tickets for the performance are $5 for students and $7 for adults at the door. Dinner and brunch tickets are $5.

On Veterans Day, when the school was otherwise closed, the dancers were hard at work coordinating the music and lighting and rehearsing dance moves ranging from "pop and lock" to ballet.

Tracy Vernon, the dance teacher, and Valerie Heron-Duranti, a 2003 ARHS graduate and Vernon's assistant, selected the cast for each of the pieces from the 25 students in the class.

"A lot of the pieces have to do with breaking some kind of societal hold on you," Heron-Duranti explained, after the dancers performed "The Unguaranteed," choreographed by Remy Fernandez-O'Brien.

The title is a reference to the first piece in the ensemble, called "The One Guarantee." That would be death, the one thing that everyone is guaranteed to experience in life, Heron-Duranti said.

"The Unguaranteed" is what happens after death, Fernandez-O'Brien said. In "The Unguaranteed," everybody wakes up from death confused. Then two of the dancers form an alliance and control the rest. Finally, the others realize that by banding together they can subdue the two controlling figures and fold them into the community.

Fernandez-O'Brien created the sound track by mixing two techno songs, a French pop song and some house music on his computer. He mixed several other songs that will be showcased in the performance, cutting out curse words as well as fading and splicing them together to make something new.

Had you asked him several years ago, he would have told you he would never get into dancing, Fernandez-O'Brien said. But he got drawn into it through the bomba class that Vernon teaches, which combines drumming and dancing. Now, he said, "Probably more so than any academic class, the dance class has made me what I am today."

Kieran Ryan, a well-regarded "pop and lock" dancer, is one of Fernandez-O'Brien's influences. (The "pop" part of the dance consists of short staccato movements, while the lock is more fluid.) Ryan was never a dancer either, until he saw the school's break dance club practicing in the hall a few years ago.

Vernon has been nudging him to incorporate more jazz moves. "I'm kind of forcing myself to go in a different direction," Ryan said. "My style has evolved."

Ryan choreographed the dance "Reciprocation," which is about how people who communicate in life continue to communicate after one of them dies. The tone of the piece evolves from anger to understanding, Ryan said.

Students Montana Strossi and Kinga McCraven were both ballet dancers originally, but Dance Theatre Ensemble has taken them in new directions.

"Tracy taught me how to move my hips," Strossi said. "She said, Montana, you don't have hips.' She's taught me salsa, merengue and mandjiani (an African dance), and she teaches you the roots behind everything. She likes to embrace where we're comfortable but to use that and move it forward."

McCraven, a senior, plans to make a career of dancing and teaching others how to dance.

"In DTE, you don't only just dance, but you learn about choreography and what makes it interesting to watch - the different dynamics of musicality, different levels," McCraven said. "Tracy always talks about the lines of your body and how to use not only your limbs but your torso. She's taught me a whole other level of dance, like your body is a tool and you're carving air with it. Some people might think dance is just a hobby, but it's not."

"You bring it with you the way you walk, the way you do your homework, the way you wash the dishes. It's such an amazing thing, dance; it makes me feel so good."

Mary Carey can be reached at mary.carey@att.net.