The SBU Dance Team has evolved from its hip-hop roots
The SBU Dance Team will be performing Grease Lightnin’ at 7 p.m. on Tuesday Nov. 27, the week students return from Thanksgiving break, in the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts.
Seniors Colleen Corrado, a biology major, and Sarah Koning, an education major, coached the team for the second year, although the team previously functioned under the name SBU Hip Hop. This is the first year the team exists as SBU Dance, but Corrado said it’s much more fitting.
“SBU Hip Hop was frankly a bad name. We didn’t just perform hip hop,” Corrado said. “It wasn’t representative of what we were doing as a group.”
She said the name would discourage students who didn’t dance hip-hop to join and would think the club was exclusively hip-hop styled dances, even though it wasn’t. The name change is not the only new thing about the team.
“There’s a big shift on the team, especially since changing names. That change is reflected in the show,” Corrado said. “We used to do mostly hip-hop dances, but now we incorporate all different disciplines of dance. Tap and contemporary, lyrical dancing, for example, while still keeping the hip-hop element.”
SBU Dance has nine choreographers this year that are responsible for putting together all the different dance styles into the show and working with the group’s ranging abilities. It was more challenging this year to incorporate all the styles into the choreography, said Corrado.
“Our choreographers rose to the occasion and produced something I think will be really amazing,” said Corrado.
They chose to base the dance off the movie Grease because they thought the members they had on the team would fit the characters perfectly, said Corrado. It also allowed for several types of dances, something the team is eager to incorporate going forward.
Katarina Jones, a sophomore computer science major, will play Sandy Olsson, one of the main characters who moves from Australia to a new school and falls in love with greaser, Danny Zuko, played by senior Geoffrey Broadbent. They have seven boys guest performing for this show, including Andrew Hayn, Kane Jordan and Ethan Pryor, all acting as greasers.
The 46 team members practiced in three separate groups four times a week in Butler Studio. The team split into practice teams so it would be easier to practice. The dances were organized by group. There will be 11 dances in this show, lasting approximately an hour and a half.
“It’s definitely a big commitment, but it’s a lot of fun,” said Corrado. “I think it’s going to be good. We have a lot of new faces on the team that bring a lot of new energy.”
By Fraser Breon, Staff Writer
breonaf18@bonaventure.edu
