The University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s dance program announced that they will be participating in the dance festival ‘Breaking Ground’ in Arizona. Dancers that will be participating included assistant professor of dance in performance arts, John Alex Mcbride and assistant professor in performance arts, Micheal Crotty.
Preparing for this remarkable opportunity however, required a lot of effort from the dancers. The dancers had to go through a challenging training period to hone their skills over a short period of time. Micheal Crotty commented, “The work was built over an extensive two week period followed by pickup rehearsals to build the work with the choreographer, Fabio Liberti.”
UL Lafayette’s dance program constantly includes different talented choreographers from around the world to help teach and grow the skills of their dancers. For the dance festival they chose the skilled Fabio Liberti to lead the show.
Fabio Liberti is an Italian choreographer who has engaged full time in different dance companies around the world, including places like Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Denmark. He has abundant experience as both a dancer and a choreographer, which in turn helped him create several award winning pieces. Additionally, Liberti founded his own company, MUOVI, in Denmark to produce his own work.
UL Lafayette’s dance program expressed excitement to work with Liberti for Breaking Ground and will continue to host more professional dancers and choreographers well into the future. However, just because the dancers are being trained by talented experts does not mean that they are not talented themselves.
The dancers performing at the dance festival are some of UL Lafayette’s best dancers, especially since they could perfect their performances with only a small time frame to prepare. Being able to manage that time crunch of learning a new production along with the usual duties within the college campus can be challenging for anyone, but for these dancers they see these challenges as a new opportunity to represent UL Lafayette.
Micheal Crotty mentioned, “More than anything, we are grateful for the opportunity to share this work and represent ourselves and UL Lafayette’s Dance Program. We do feel prepared and excited for this opportunity.”
The dance program offers many opportunities for dancers to showcase what they learned throughout the year though. They have their mainstage productions, annual State of LA Danse production in the fall and additional performance opportunities like Oiseaux Tristes, 15 Scores and L’eau de Danse. Breaking Ground is only one of the events that UL Lafayette’s dancers can be a part of.
Additionally, students under the performance arts major are required to audition for all pieces in order to be included in the mainstage production each semester and if casted not only are they required to accept the roles offered to them, but attendance at rehearsals and arriving on time ready to work is mandatory.
The program aims to push its dancers to be the best of their ability both on and off the dance floor. The dancers learn skills they need to perform like endurance and coordination but they also learn skills they need in a business environment like time management skills and flexibility with job offerings. Therefore, when special events like Breaking Ground arrive they are able to show the world what UL Lafayette’s dancers are capable of.