The Park City High School Dance Company performs Wednesday and Thursday at the Eccles Black Box. It includes video presentations and live dance performances from more than two-dozen students.
Park City High School Dance Teacher Ashley Mott says they call the presentation an informance as it’s designed to show and inform the audience of what they’ve learned so far this year.
“It’s a chance for the students to demonstrate what they’ve been learning in dance curriculum and demonstrate their knowledge both through informing the audience verbally as well as demonstrating physically. So, they have informational videos that talk about what they've been learning or what they were focusing on and then they offer a demonstration or performance physically to clarify those concepts for the audience.”
The theme of the show is the dance making process and most of the work is student choreographed. Students will dance in each other’s works, not in their own. She co-created one dance with her students and there are a couple of guest artist pieces that will be performed. One of the dances was created last semester and inspired by the birth of one student’s baby brother.
“We had a guest artist last semester named Nick Jerrica who is part of Ririe Woodbury Dance Company and he set a piece on dancers. So, they dedicated the dance to a student Ashley, her baby brother who was born that week. So they use that in their process of creating the dance and of course Nick Jerrica had no idea that would be part of his process when he came to work with us and it's sort of evolved so he involved the students in creating that story together.”
This show includes 8th through 12th grade students all part of the Dance II class. It’s their showcase performance for the year.
“Where they produce the show, the decide on the theme as I mentioned before they choreograph and perform in it. They also do all of the backside of the production, so they write the press release. They make the poster they, donya here is in charge of making our programs, they sell the tickets. All of the production elements are also student run or student driven.”
The Park city High School’s dance informance is Wednesday and Thursday starting at 7 P.M. in the Eccles Black Box Theater.
