School of Dance builds community for first-year students through innovative program and performance opportunity

From Oct. 14-19, the School of Dance facilitated a residency with professional artist Katherine Ferrier thanks to support from an 1804 Fund awarded to Associate Dance Professor Christi Camper Moore, PhD.

“The grant supports an artist coming in to work with everybody in the School of Dance…but specifically they set a brand new work…for all of our first year dance majors, so it’s a huge community building opportunity,” Camper Moore said. 

According to Camper Moore, this residency in the School of Dance engages students immediately upon their arrival and helps them create a “dance identity as it’s formed through performance.”

Ferrier is the fourth visiting artist to participate in this annual residency, an opportunity that comes with its own set of criteria.

“It has to be someone who understands and values community because that’s what we’re trying to build,” Camper Moore said. “... it has to be someone who can work collaboratively; we’re not doing dance to our students; we’re doing it with them and so we want that creative lens. Then obviously they have to be really rooted in their practice.”

Ferrier has been honing her craft and creating her own dance identity for over 30 years. In her weeklong residency, she imparted lessons from those years of work via improvisation and composition classes, workshops with students across various Chaddock + Morrow College of Fine Arts departments and rehearsals for the aforementioned work.

“The through line of everything I’m offering is making sense by making and sensing,” Ferrier said. “The strategy is right in the phrase: how do you make sense when things feel chaotic, how do you make sense of an experience? By showing up as fully as you can to it, immersing yourself in it, making from it and sensing everything you can about it.”

By the end of the week, Ferrier had created at least one point of contact with each School of Dance student, in addition to numerous connections with students in the School of Art + Design through her interdisciplinary artistic work.

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“If nothing else, I just want to offer something that’s going to serve students in whatever it is they’re doing, and that might just be ‘trust yourself’ or ‘you’re never stuck,’ because there’s always some other way around,” Ferrier said. 

Ferrier also hopes she provided students with the experience of being seen and acknowledged by a teacher in their field.

“I remember many moments like that through my education where I just felt seen by a teacher and what that meant to me,” she said. 

Students will premiere the new dance work “By the time you read this” at the Winter Dance Concert in February. They will continue feeding their creative community in the coming months of rehearsals and growing the seeds of passion and development planted by Ferrier and supported by the School of Dance faculty.

“They are in a creative community and will work together from now until February,” Camper Moore said. “Then they present and perform that creative research as a class, so that culminating experience reflects months of community building and really rooting into who they are here.

Building these relationships and a community of practice supports students' learning and engagement. This is critical to ensuring that our students feel a sense of belonging that is inclusive of their experience, voice, and relevancy in the field."