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Here, it’s a very friendly and loving and safe environment
for the creative process to just sort of bloom and explode into whatever you want it to be.
[music]
♫
♪ Some nights I stay up cashing in my bad luck ♪ ♪ Some nights I call it a draw ♪
♫
When you step into the PARTV building, you’re free to express yourself
through the art of dance however you want to.
Um, as a student, it was really helpful, because now we are given those opportunities
to create and we’re encouraged to explore in non-traditional ways
and try to find ways to make beauty in the body, or see where it can go.
[jazz music]
Every year the dance department brings in guest choreographers,
and this past year they brought in Brian and Steinunn,
who’ll be involved in this process.
Um, we did a intensive for about a month in the winter,
where they set a piece on a bunch of dancers,
and it’s called MEAT. And this piece was presented at ACDFA,
and then it was selected from there to go on to nationals in Washington, DC.
And we performed at the Kennedy Center.
[pop music]
When I came to the department, I instantly just connected with all of the professors,
‘cause they, I can tell that they were real.
And they weren’t intimidating; they were very welcoming
and just excited to have me there and have me join the program.
We’re really lucky here to have Nicole Bradley Browning, Karen Kaufmann,
Michelle Antonioli, Heidi Jones Eggert, who really invest their whole heart and soul
into helping you become the artist that you want to be
in terms of choreographically, performance-wise, and grow as an individual.
Faculty members possess their own individual qualities,
but we share a drive to see people learn.
Jumping Into Fire? It was a collaboration
between Nicole Bradley Browning from the Dance Department
and Jillian Campana from the Theater Department to create this play that involved dancing,
as well as theater elements.
[muffled drums playing]
[male voice] Ebbs and flows.
Rivers, drifting souls.
Slashing the senders.
[eerie music]
If water were a stage, some musical metaphor praising the stonefly's swan song.
We'd see a fiend, a flash of rainbow tail.
Flushed tight in a cutthroat's jaw.
Now, stick me in the bottom of cream...
[tranquil music]
♫
[worldbeat music]
♫
(male narrator) Ponderosa Pines learned to reach tall
and spread their branches high and wide.
They send their roots deep into the earth and grow thick bark, all to resist the fire.
When fire dances with Ponderosa Pine forests,
it creeps through the needles and grasses and crawls up the low shrubs.
These creepy crawly fires burned the ground fuels and the little fir
who crowd in under the huge old tree.
[audience laughter]
[mocking laugh]
[fake laugh]
[audience laughter]
[audience laughter]
I’ve really grown to appreciate the creativity that comes out of students
here in the Dance Department.
♫
Being in Montana plays a part in who we are as a department.
The students come here loving the outdoors and we embrace that.
We dance in the river; we dance on the mountains; we dance under the moon.
And that helps define who we are at the University of Montana.
[soft piano music]
♫
Here at the University of Montana, the dance program
gives students many opportunities to choreograph.
We are given the opportunity to learn about lighting designs, costume design,
set design if we wish to have that in our choreography
or as part of our choreography.
We’re really given free rein to explore whatever is inside of us and is waiting to come out.
[banjo music]
Um, the University also allowed me into the world of teaching dance in the schools
and integrating the curriculum with that.
Um, I never even knew that that was a thing.
I had no idea that you could do something so amazing.
Dancers, I want you to find a curvy pathway.
So would a curvy pathway have any straight edges or corners?
Awesome, I see Christian’s finding nice curvy pathways.
Maybe you add in your arms—
The Department has changed me as a person,
because my perspective is just totally different on life.
I know that I do have a future in dance,
and I don’t know if it’s performing, or choreographing,
or doing something completely random, but whatever I do, it will be of dance.
[music]
♫