In Dance Ensemble (DE), a two-term Dance Studies capstone course, students work under the direction of different faculty and guest choreographers. Under normal circumstances, the dancers end the year with a fully produced live performance, but because Knox’s 2020 spring term moved online, Associate Professor and Chair of Dance Jennifer Smith had to restructure. 

Smith explained that, in preparing for the remote term, she went back to the basics. “For me, ensemble is about community, and it is about collaboration. I wanted to keep those as critical components,” she said. “I felt like I owed it to them to recognize that we were still an ensemble. We have spent all this time building collaboration, building a real sense of community, and I felt that that warranted the need to find an alternative.”

“We looked at how to still perform, ‘How do we build on these skills, but use a very different format?’ The idea is to kind of look at the idea of the art form of dance-for-video and recognize that it is much more than what you think.” Using that format, the ensemble created three different projects together—and two have been shared online.

Smith got the idea for the first project from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, which shared online videos of movement with its community. “I invited our choreographers to create a snippet of movement. I loaded them into Google Drive and said [to the students], ‘Here you go. Create.’”

Dance Ensemble's second project was based on work from an Ohio State University professor, and it was “like a chain letter, except in dance.” For the third project, each dancer created a longer solo work based on a piece by a Belgian choreographer.

Smith said that a surprising side-effect of the remote term has been the connection to a larger dance community.

“It’s helping me recognize that my creative network is much bigger than I sometimes think,” she said. “It’s a reminder of why we dance, why we create in the first place. It helps us process the world we live in. It helps us connect to those in that world, and I definitely feel like the work we’ve done has been a part of that.”

Smith added that while there has been more one-on-one feedback than ever before, she is hungry to get back into the studio to collaborate more directly with her students.

“While there are substitutions that can be made, there’s nothing like the real thing,” she said. “There are incredibly valuable things about live art that can’t be replicated.”

For Sadie Cheney '21, the remote term was their first participating in Dance Ensemble. “Considering the circumstances, I still had a fruitful DE experience,” they said. “Even if it isn’t the same, I am proud of what I completed and how I adapted as a dancer.”

“The biggest takeaway is that we can basically do everything we usually do online. It brings a whole new awareness to our society,” added Cheney. “I’m also the president of Terpsichore Dance Collective, and we put together a virtual dancefest where students submitted little videos of [themselves] dancing. It’s nice to see that we are still holding on to traditions, even if it takes a new form.”

Cheney said that DE is working hard to keep the Knox spirit alive.

“When I think of Knox, I think of collaboration and the human-powered experience, and I feel that [Professor Smith] has worked extra hard to make sure this is still a part of our experience,” Cheney said. “It has shown me that dancing is more than just creating a piece and performing it, it’s about the camaraderie and the solidarity between the dancers.”