Okay so not really my first time being given the title “Guest Artist” but definitely the first time I’ve been featured as such. Last month The Danscompany of Gainesville put on their annual Spring Concert to showcase some major works for funding provided by Dance Florida. The past three years I was in charge of the hip hop numbers since I was on faculty- and every year I’ve been striving to push my choreographic abilities to the next level. This year I choreographed the hip hop piece from out of town and was featured in the show with a separate piece reserved for the annual Guest Artist. I was honored to be asked to do it, so I grabbed my best gal Kami and created a duet for us to perform. I was ecstatic to receive so much positive feedback about all of the afore mentioned works.
For the hip hop piece, I created a narrative piece to showcase the four elements of hip hop. In it, the dancers were all students at a hip hop highschool taking classes on everything hip hop. For the piece, the dancers were broken up into groups to present to the teacher (me) each element of hip hop: the dj, graffiti, the emcee, and the bboy. I had a lot of fun creating the work and I feel like I educated dancers and viewers alike to some of the foundations of hip hop. Oh yeah, and the choreography wasn’t too shabby either.
For the duet, Kami and I really pushed ourselves into an energetic 4-minute jazz piece. The Danscompany is very well known for duets with heavy male/female partnering, so this year I thought I would try something different and choreograph something with a lot more unison movement. The result was a fun work loosely based around a guy daydreaming about his best girl with Guns and Roses playing in the background.
Here’s a look at the duet from dress rehearsal: