"Until We Forget" by Maddy Sher SC MFA '24. Photo by Derek Fowles.
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Academic Year 2024
Repertory Artist
Every year Five College Dance invites a professional choreographer to set a work on students from all five colleges. This year’s artist was the seminal postmodern dancemaker Lucinda Childs. Caitlin Scranton, Smith College ‘05 and Childs Dance Company soloist, staged "Dance 1" (1979) set to Philip Glass’s Dance No. 1. In her Five College Dance Fall Lecture, Childs offered a retrospective and later gave feedback to performers. “I have never before been challenged by a dance piece in the way 'Dance 1' has challenged me,” says May Saito, a junior BFA student at UMass in a Dance Magazine article about the Five College Dance repertory projects (November 2023). “After every section we learned, we all felt that it couldn’t get more complicated – and then it did. Even when we aren’t running their cast, everyone stands on the side counting and offering support.” Becca Robertson UM '25 (L), Ryann Burns UM '26 (R) in "Dance 1" at UM/HC Faculty Concert, Fall 23. Photo by Paul Bloomfield.
Faculty Spotlight
In 2024, Jake continued his long standing work platforming the legacy of friend and mentor, the late iconoclastic jazz drummer Milford Graves. He contributed curatorial research and archival material to "Mind/Body Deal", the comprehensive Graves exhibition which opened at Usdan Gallery at Bennington College, VT, in early 2024. This summer Criterion released five new Graves focused short films by Meginsky, "The Magic of Milford Graves: films by Jake Meginsky". In April, he presented two new quadraphonic sound works at the Northampton Center for the Arts, exploring the idea of the sun as a conscious being. Also in 2024, the song co-written with Kim Gordon, "Don't Play It" was featured in the Apple TV series "Sugar" starring Colin Farrell. Jake has maintained a busy schedule performing solo with his modular synthesizer, including concerts at the Goethe Institute in Boston, The Clark Art Museum, and the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. This summer, he was a musician in residence at the Bates Dance Festival, Lewiston, ME, collaborating with choreographer Kendra Portier. Later this year he has a solo recording coming out on OFC records and is planning a USA/European tour for summer 2025 to support the release.
Alumnx Spotlight
LOCULUS, a dance collective in Western Mass, is currently directed by founding members Olana Flynn (HC F’09) and Madison Palffy (HC F’10). Olana holds an MFA in Experimental Choreography from UC, Riverside, and Madison holds an MFA in Dance with an emphasis on somatics and improvisation from CU Boulder. Both are currently lecturers in dance at Keene State College. LOCULUS' performances are site specific and rooted in their engagement in DIY artist communities. They perform at events in bars, yards, and houses, as well as in concert dance spaces. Many of these events are hosted, curated, and produced by LOCULUS and bring together visual artists, musicians, and performers from a variety of media to spark cross-disciplinary dialogue. In addition to their performance work, LOCULUS publishes a print and online journal and hosts classes, performances, and talks. LOCULUS is in the midst of planning their third semi-annual festival celebrating multi-disciplinary performance, process, and practice that will take place in Holyoke this September. Photo by Matt Flynn.
Alumnx Spotlight
Julia Antinozzi is a choreographer and dance artist based in New York City. Most recently, Julia received the 2023-2024 Trisk Fellowship from Triskelion Arts, and was selected to be a 2023-2024 New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks artist. Through these two opportunities Julia presented her first evening length work, THE SUITE, for the Trisk Fellowship and THIRD VARIATION, an epilogue of THE SUITE, for Fresh Tracks. The two works feature performers Kelsey Saulnier (UM '18), Sienna Blaw, Dasol Kim, and Paulina Meneses, composer Ryan Wolfe, and costume designer Sonya Gadet-Molansky. The project revises typical structures and characters of romantic, plot-de-emphasized ballets and practices a casual technique integrating form, pantomime gesture, and mellow bravura. Julia began choreographing at Smith, taking her first composition classes from Jennifer Nugent and Katie Martin. She created 10 works during her time there, including several for the student-run dance company Celebrations Dance. Julia currently works at Movement Research in the programs department.
Alumnx Spotlight
Olivia Brown is the Assistant Production Manager at The Joyce Theater in New York City, a leading dance presenter. Her love of working backstage grew while she was pursuing her BFA in Dance at UMass Amherst; completing crew requirements, working on student shows, and as a stagehand part-time at UMass' Fine Arts Center. Olivia was first introduced to Jacob’s Pillow through their College Partnership Program with Five College Dance, attending a Pillow Lab showing. In 2018, Olivia became a Production Intern at the Pillow. Her knowledge of technical theater was expanded upon tenfold as was her exposure to dance companies from across the world. After her internship, Olivia returned in multiple roles with the Pillow’s production team for 4 summers. After graduating from UMass, Brown moved to NYC where she began freelancing as a Stage Manager, Production Manager, Company Manager, Electrician, and Audio Engineer. By experiencing how every role in a production functioned, she was better equipped to advocate for crew members when managing performances. Olivia is thrilled to join The Joyce Theater full-time, tackling 48 weeks of dance programming a year. Although she has called New York home for the past few years, the Berkshires will always hold a special place in her heart thanks to UMass and Jacob's Pillow. Photo courtesy Olivia Brown.
Student Spotlight
Ayo Eniola's senior thesis, Symbiotic Futures, an immersive performance experience, merged dance with ancestral veneration. A guide led the audience through the trails, where BIPOC performers interacted with the natural world and embodied the elements earth, water, fire, and air. The performance was an ode to communities that have been living harmoniously with their environments, and a reminder that we must all come together to decolonize our relationships with the natural world. In their research, Ayo focused on African diasporic communities, their blood ancestors, and American Indigenous communities, the ancestors and ongoing protectors of the land on which they are currently situated. For these communities, art plays an active role in ceremony and community building. Symbiotic Futures drew on this tradition of art as an actor, as sacred, and as a container for community, in order to meditate on the interconnectedness between humans and nature. The audience were not mere witnesses, but active participants. They walked through the woods in search of the performers, sang along with their songs, and planted seeds on the Book & Plow Farm plots. Ayo received funding from within and outside the colleges to source costumes and props from BIPOC vendors and pay collaborators. This summer, Ayo will be working on Mumbet's Freedom Farm, a Black and Brown led biodynamic farm in Sheffield, MA. Photo by Yuanji “Emma” Qu and Jaden Santina.
Student Spotlight
I had the privilege to train and collaborate with Duane Lee Holland Jr., UMass faculty, on “Nourishment,” culminating in performance for the Smith Fall Faculty Dance Concert. We began late-August with a week-long training intensive in which Duane challenged us physically and intellectually with his style of movement—a highly technical and fluid fusion of jazz, hip hop, house, and contemporary—and his way of thinking about dance in relation to poetry, history, and the African diaspora. In regular rehearsals, Duane set the group sections, which pulsed with the vitality and resilience of the collective. He pushed us to see one another, to fuel each other’s energy, and to dance boldly in conversation with the polyrhythmic movement and music. Then we were asked to choreograph a short solo in response to one of his favorite poems about dance. He coached us in our solo so that our individual strengths and personality shone through our movement. In performance, each dancer had the opportunity to push boundaries through moving in solo and in relation to others. Genuine care for one another and a collective aspiration towards artistic growth permeated the rehearsal process. This allowed all of us to truly let go, explore, and cultivate joy every time we ran the piece in the studio and on the stage. Photo by Derek Fowles.
Student Spotlight
The UMass Fall Faculty concert was memorable for me; I was honored to be a performer in both Lauren Cox’s “Funk is Dad” and Molly Fletcher Lynch-Clark’s “What Still Lingers?,” as well as Lucinda Childs’ “Dance I (1979),” the Five College Dance repertory project. Using entirely different collaborative research and rehearsal processes, the faculty works tackled different topics: Professor Cox’s loss of her father, and the stories of young people through the pandemic. My dance-filled semester kept my body and imagination active. For “Dance 1,” traveling to different campuses, bonding with students and faculty across the colleges, and meeting Lucinda Childs were memorable events. The concert allowed me to explore my versatility as a dancer and pushed my stamina. I miss those long rehearsal nights, quick changes, and ice baths—the difficult moments allowed me to shine on stage. As for my future dancing, I am pursuing an MA in Dance Leadership and Community Practice at Trinity Laban in London. This program has a community engaged dance education lens, where students put the theories of dance education to work as community practitioners around London. I hope to continue as a dance educator in public schools, bringing the magic of dance to children who may otherwise not have access to it. Photo by Paul Bloomfield.
Student Spotlight
These two events highlight my self journey with dance through my college years which have given me the additional strength and power I have today.
- May 1, 2022 - I opened for American rapper Jack Harlow with Katya Taylor UM ‘22 by my side. I had the opportunity to showcase collaborative choreography, artistic voice, and value for our artistry in an arena filled with thousands of people. The amount of support and love we received from our auditions to a live show where we were chosen by audience vote gave me more light to share my talent with the community at UMass and Five Colleges. I can say this was a catapulting moment.
- April 21, 2024 - I wanted my final thesis to be unconventional. I asked myself “What else can I bring into my work?” “Kat’s 10th Birthday” illustrates the difficulties of adulthood and celebrates the self entering a new stage in life and rebirth. The reality of youth in foster care means jumping from home to home, homelessness, abuse, and in some cases adoption forcing kids to abandon their childhood. Knowing when to be an adult and when to be a child is endless, but our inner child never goes away. In this work, I wanted to give back to the community, not only through ticket sales, but also by including some of my students from The Center, a local dance studio. I have been successful pursuing a degree in dance and psychology while curating my professional dance career. I am now signed to Bloc Talent Agency in NYC and LA. Photo, Kat Lopez.
Academic Year 2023
Faculty Spotlight
Convergence, an innovative performance and, simultaneously, a film project, was conceived and directed by UMass Amherst professor Aston McCullough as a blended world of dance performance and scientific research communication. Presented by the Dance Program’s Laboratory for the Scientific Study of Dance (LAB:SYNC), the Department of Music and Dance, and Five College Dance, Convergence received the first-ever National Endowment for the Arts funding for an arts research lab. LAB:SYNC’s research focuses on the relationship between dance and health in adults. Here, UMass Professor Aston McCullough rehearses Convergence with dancer Jillian Murray '23. Photo by Crystal Maldonado.
Alumnx Spotlight
Originally from Chicago, Mariana Valencia ’06 graduated from Hampshire College, where she studied dance and ethnography. Her studies affected her early dance works, which were influenced by postmodern, Afro-diasporic, and Pan-Latin forms. Over time she began making self-narrative performances that blend choreography and imagery, ethnography and memoir, as well as observations of her cross-cultural identifiers. Mariana’s notable achievements include receiving the 2018 Bessie Award for Outstanding “Breakout” Choreographer and being chosen to be an artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Most recently, Mariana was awarded the prestigious Creative Capital Award which offers direct funding to individual artists. Besides receiving professional development as part of the award, Mariana is creating Arrival, in which the liveness of rehearsal and experience-making questions the rigidity of performance frameworks. Mariana, pictured here in Arrival, says, “The practice is arrival, a constant showing up, and a promise to embody practice.” Photo by Paula Court.
Repertory Artist
Every year Five College Dance invites a professional choreographer to set a work on students from all five colleges. This year’s artist was Bessie Award winning Tatiana Desardouin of Passion Fruit Dance Company, a street dance theater and educational company. Desardouin’s premier for Five College Dance, Connection (2022), emphasized the importance of creating connections first within, then with the world. She was inspired by the dancers who shared what the word “connection” meant to them. The resulting work highlights the singularities of the dancers in their search for connection, but also the idea of being one with everyone and everything that exists.
Dancers (left to right): Mina Stern-Wenk ’23 (Hampshire) and Summer Pratt ’26 (Mount Holyoke) perform Connection at Smith College Fall Faculty Concert, Fall 2022. Photo by Derek Fowles.
Student Spotlight
I started my research on Eleanor Yung and the Asian American Dance Theatre (AADT) - a dance company founded by Yung in 1974 and active until the early 1990s - for my dance history paper. As someone part of the Chinese diaspora, pursuing Asian American studies, and interested in dance with grassroots organizing, finding a dance figure and company that reflected my interests was very special to me. However, I had trouble finding sources. By relying on written source materials, I completed my paper, but the research felt incomplete. Thus, I did a year-long special study. I traveled to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library to watch the AADT dance videos and also a recent oral history with Eleanor Yung. My final paper analyzed the archival organization of materials related to Yung and AADT, noting the marginalized status of a community-centered Asian American dance company may play a part in the incomplete archives. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Eleanor Yung over Zoom! Being able to share my work with her has been the highlight of the entire process. It reminds me of a big reason why I wanted to pursue this special studies: to learn from Asian diasporic/Asian American figures who have come before me and to help preserve their history.
Jenny Huang in Rodger Blum's Grown Ocean (2022).
Photo by Derek Fowles.
Student Spotlight
The piece I brought to ACDA is called "Poet," about desire and courage. It is inspired by Chinese poet Yu Xiuhua, a countrywoman with cerebral palsy living amid prejudice, sexism, and an unhappy marriage. Her poems hold a strong and vigorous desire for escape and love. They are like wheat crops, rooted deeply into the earth and dancing upwards. The day I came across her poems, I couldn’t fall asleep, losing myself in thoughts. The sparks she ignited in me pushed the creation of "Poet." I had an amazing time presenting the work at the American College Dance Association Northeast Regional Conference last spring. Putting a solo on stage is daunting at first, but the support from other fellow dancers / choreographers made my heart full. I also grew a lot from feedback given by adjudicators and fellow dancers. Now I am working on a dance / theater piece "Drift" with six amazing dancers. This piece explores misplacement both as an inner feeling and a spatial re-imagination.
– Yang Sun, Amherst College '24
Yang Sun in rehearsal for "Poet" at Amherst College.
Photo by Sydney Ireland AC '23.
Student Spotlight
My work in dance accompaniment and composition began at the end of fall semester of my junior year at Mount Holyoke College. I had been working toward a music degree but did not know how I wanted to put my studies to use. I was taking advanced modern technique accompanied by Peter Jones. After spending the semester moving to live music and watching dance performances with live accompaniment, I knew that I wanted to bridge the gap between my music and dance practices. Peter kindly supported my efforts in applying my music knowledge and mentored me through two semesters of live accompaniment in modern classes. Between junior and senior year, I had the opportunity to study dance accompaniment further through Mount Holyoke’s Lynk funding program. I studied with David Dorfman and his company at Connecticut College, as well as Bates Dance Festival under the mentorship of Terrence Karn. I have learned so much about myself as both a musician and a dancer in the past three semesters of study. Thank you to Peter Jones and Mt. Holyoke dance.
– Mav Leslie, Mount Holyoke College ‘23
August Grace ‘23 and Mav Leslie ‘23 (front) in Sammie Murray’s ‘23 “Bounce with Me."
Photo by Ali Meizels ‘23.
Student Spotlight
This past March 2023, I had the opportunity to show my work GUSH at the American College Dance Association (ACDA) regional conference at Montclair State University in Montclair, NJ. The piece began as a solo for Smith College’s Bare Bones Dance Concert in December 2022, and later, with the help of my classmates, became a colorful trio with cupcake eating, frosting face-painting, hand holding, and trash cans full of pom-pom explosions. In February, I created a new version of GUSH to take to ACDA, enriching its themes of queer joy, relationship, youth, resistance, resilience, and intensity. Showing GUSH, taking classes, and watching other works at ACDA by student artists from all over the Northeast left me feeling refreshed and excited to continue making dances. –Abbey Fluet, Smith College ’25
Smith College dancer Abbey Fluet ’25 rehearses GUSH, Fall 2022, Scott Dance Studio, Smith College. Photo by Samantha Miller Grossman ’23
Previous Newsletters
Annual Newsletter 2020-2021
Keep up with the work of Five College Dance students, faculty members, and alumni in this epublication of our annual newsletter.
Annual Newsletter 2019-2020
Check out the work of Five College Dance students, faculty, and alums.