Against the blue-lit scrim of the Bolton, dancers balance precariously on wooden stilts like giraffes, rickety human architecture against the fluid movement of their earth-bound counterparts. Figures in white scraps of costumes move about the floor, weaving in and out of their 16 people in this featured performance. You know it’s time for the Spring Dance Concert when the Bolton Stage is transformed into a playground of movement and light, when over forty dancers take the stage and captivate the Kenyon community in three spell-binding performances.

This season’s dance concert, as in past years, showcases the work of both student choreographers and dance professors. The stage features pieces by Professor Balinda Craig-Quijada, Assistant Professor Julie Brodie, and Part-Time Professor Kathleen Pierson, whose pieces of “music visualization” attempts to translate the musical form directly from note to movement.

The entire company is thrilled with the results of the rehearsal process: senior Sara Murdock notes on her involvement in Craig-Quijada’s piece, “It’s the most gratifying piece I’ve danced in thus far. It’s emotionally complex and compositionally straightforward at the same time. I always feel a little bit sad when it ends. For some reason it feels calmly tragic.”

This year also features the work of guest choreographer and former adjunct professor Kristina Isabelle, who choreographs the senior piece, entitled Levels & Lines (Part 16). The piece involves an electronic music score by Tricky and UNKLE, sixteen dancers both grounded and on wooden stilts, and lighting designed by Kenyon’s own Will Adashek ’05 and costumes by Professor Andrew Reinert. Isabelle’s work is part of a series based on the paintings of Joan Mitchell, an abstract expressionist painter from the 1940s. Isabelle says on her piece, which creates visual imagery by moving through several different levels of the Bolton space, that “it’s about altering people’s perspectives, trying to take in the different levels on the stage—the stilts enable the audience to get involved, to open their minds to something new.” Isabelle’s piece looks right at home on the Bolton Stage, which affords a size and scope of choreographic vision that far surpasses that of the Hill Stage. Several of the pieces this year recall the same intimacy of last semester’s concert. One of the senior pieces, choreographed by Shannon Donald, features Ellery Biddle ’05 in an extended solo entitled “Taken Apart Years.” “Ellery was my inspiration for it,” says Donald, “so we generated all of the movement together and created the quirky character that she becomes on stage.”

Senior Sara Murdock complicates her “Weaving Mind Diving” with six singers, five dancers, and herself immersed in her own complex choreography. Senior Hall Carlough presents his final piece of choreography at Kenyon, building on the wild success of last semester’s piece, “Little Black Boxes.”

Lindsay Junkin’s solo, entitled “Static Discourse,” presented some problems in its conception. “I came up with some images and feelings i had about my movement, and I realized that I was working with two dynamics: fluid, free movement, and ‘stuck’ or sharper/limited movement.” Junkin describes her dance as investigating the parameters of reality: “I always end up in a box of light, symbolizing entrapment, or, in more optimistic terms, a paradigm in which I can only think and exist in a certain kind of way. My life is formed and can adjust and develop in a limited fashion because there is a track on which I am predetermined to live.”

In addition to the senior pieces, three pieces are choreographed by rising juniors, what Craig-Quijada notes is a nice “orientation to what they’ll be doing next year as senior dancers.” Junior Abi Rollins’ choreography features an original score by Professor Ted Buehrer of the Music department, while the piece by juniors Katie Capaldi and Louisa Harding features children from the Wiggin Street Elementary School, which the choreographers note serves “as a constant reminder of their ever-present freedom of movement.”

This concert brings many new things from the Dance Department to the Kenyon community: new choreographers, a class of extraordinary departing dancers, and a whole new group of dancers getting ready to participate. Murdock comments, “I’m really glad there are so many new people in the concert that haven’t ever been involved before. It’s nice to know that there’s a healthy interest in the department.” With so much offered in just one show, it would be a shame to miss this season’s offering from Kenyon’s dance department.

The Spring Dance Concert will be performed Thursday, May 5th through Saturday, May 7th at 8 PM in the Bolton Theater. Tickets are $1 and are available at the Bolton Box Office (pbx 5546).