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Park City High Dancers Explore Emotion And Movement At 'Informance'

Park City High School

Park City High School dancers will see the fruits of their labor born out on stage this Tuesday. KPCW’s Emily Means has more.

On top of their regular time commitments, students from Park City High’s Dance Company II have been busy producing their informative and informal performance, or “Informance,” which they will present Tuesday, Jan. 15.

Every part of the production has been driven by students, from choreographing each piece to editing videos to be featured in the show. The performance will feature six main dances, representing the emotions happiness, sadness, fear, contempt, surprise, and anger. Dancer April Buys says the students collectively decided on the theme and the different aspects of dance they wanted to explore.

“So we had kind of a group brainstorm, and we’re all thinking of concepts we wanted to work with and things we wanted to discuss and teach about and learn more about," Buys said. "We eventually decided on learning about dance concepts called Bartenieff Fundamentals and Laban Movement, and we were pairing that with emotion and exploring how body articulation relates to different emotions, and where that stems from in your body and how you show that.”

Dancer Juliana Klug explains that there are different ways to express human emotions through body language.

“For example, if you were scared, you might want to curl up in a ball and be very inward, and that’s one movement that we have, that we’ve been working with and understanding, whereas if you were trying to show a happy emotion, it would be one that we call cordis, where you come in and burst out, where it’s like you’re happy and you’re trying to show it.”

Informance is free and open to the public, with shows at 5:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. at the Eccles Center’s Black Box Theater.

Emily Means hadn’t intended to be a journalist, but after two years of studying chemistry at the University of Utah, she found her fit in the school’s communication program. Diving headfirst into student media opportunities, Means worked as a host, producer and programming director for K-UTE Radio as well as a news writer and copy editor at The Daily Utah Chronicle.