
Saint Mary's Dance Company Achieves Honors at Dance Festival
Each spring, Saint Mary's College Dance Company travels to the American College Dance Association’s annual conference to take in dance all day long. Our students are also invited to perform, and their works are adjudicated by an esteemed set of artists. This year, our conference was virtual, and we enjoyed dance classes from artists around the country. We shared our dances virtually as well and TWO were chosen for two separate Galas (the honor given to those from the best of the conference). This is the first in our SMCDC history!
For our West region, one of our grad students, Amy Kubat, created a work called Again from the Right Ventricle, a dance created for the Zoom screen. The three adjudicators praised her performance and the work. One stated: “I can watch this dancer all day long, she is exquisite.”
The other piece was chosen for the ACDA Screendance Festival, a national conference. A screendance created by undergrad Holly Welpott for her senior project in dance, She Remembers, was chosen for the National Gala! This dance also featured three undergrads, Kat Mertel, Maggie Sepsey and Madison Roethler. The adjudicators praised the screendance as “beautiful, well-crafted, and fully-realized with a dramatic rhythmic quality [that] has the unique quality of storytelling.” They also commented on the performance of our students stating they “are technically facile” dancing “beautifully and ferociously.”
Two other students, Alyssa Plummer and Madison Roethler had dances that also represented the College and received excellent feedback from our adjudicators. Alyssa Plummer’s dance To Tell the Truth was praised for its “inventive choreography;” and Madison Roethler’s screendance Involuted Reverie was “effective and haunting” and will be included in the Informal Screening for the festival.
Please join me in congratulating our students!
Visit www.acda.dance if you are interested in seeing this work in the Screendance Festival April 10-24, 2021.
Please join us for our upcoming Dance Concert Spring Forward May 6-8 live in LeFevre Theatre for faculty, staff, and students, online for general audience. The film will be available on demand May 9th-June 15th. For tickets and more info: stmarys-ca.edu/springforward
Also, feel free to watch our Fall Dance Concert Film: https://vimeo.com/smcperfa/viii
Thanks!
Professor Cathy Davalos
Director of Undergraduate Dance