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• Site specific dance performances bring movement to the public

Contrary to popular belief, everyone can dance. Dance doesn’t have to be a choreographed routine full of leaps and pirouettes. It also doesn’t have to take place within a dance studio or performance hall. With their highly innovative site-specific pieces, choreographers and graduate students Hallie Aldrich and Sarah Haas show that you can find dance anytime, anywhere—sometimes where you least expect it.

In her piece “with Love and Vanish”, Aldrich explores the root of love, using filtered layers of inquiry and historical and personal context to give viewers an idea of the difference between physical attraction and romantic love.

“Dancemaking is pretty intuitive, and I used to separate my studio work and my personal life. Last year I realized there are overlaps, and integrating them would give me more insight,” Aldrich explains.

Inspiration for the piece came from a variety of sources, from Sufi poet Rumi to whirling dervishes to iconic couples like Bonnie and Clyde. Dancers and actors move through the Arboretum using mostly contact improvisation, with a few twists thrown in—including a reinterpretation of a scene between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ophelia, as well as a rowboat in the nearby lake.

Aldrich hopes that audience members will come away from the performance with not only questions about their own sense of love and relationships, but a heightened sense of the cultural impact dance can have, as well.

“I think dance needs to be part of public daily life, and site-specific pieces are one way of doing that,” Aldrich says. “There’s this residue of memory, a shadow of the dance that’s carried by audience members to other audience members. It’s a cultural experience that unites community and place.”

Sarah Haas focuses on a similar blurring of people and their environment her piece, “Raw”, which uses a variety of visual and auditory stimuli encourage audience members to examine the connection between humans and space. The piece takes place in the Natural History Building (currently under construction), amidst crumbling plaster and massive, empty rooms.

“Everybody dances and moves — there’s not any one person who’s not creative,” Haas says. “Sometimes there’s this separation between people and artists, but it’s part of our experience as humans.”