“Elizabeth Boles is a senior majoring in currently joint majoring in Dance and Anthropology with a minor in Spanish.  She grew up in the small town of Sharon, VT and is the first generation in her family to receive a college education. This past summer, with the generous funding of Middlebury Arts Council, she spend three intense and rewarding weeks at the Bates College Dance Festival in Lewiston, Maine. Here is her story.”

Dance Festival

When I arrived on the Bates College campus I found myself thrust into a community of choreographers, performers, educators and students.  Classes ran from 9am to 5:30pm, followed by rehearsals, informal showings, talks and performances in the evenings. My day began with modern technique taught by Carol Dilley.  This class nicely complemented my prior training at Middlebury and I was able to work on reinforcing my skills and paying serious attention to the details of the technique.  Each day I left this class sweating and energized to attend Making Dances II with Bebe Miller.  The opportunity to work with Miller on developing my choreographic skills was immensely exciting, in part because seeing the Bebe Miller Company three years ago at Middlebury College was my first introduction to the field of contemporary dance and in some way contributed to my decision to follow my current career path.

Following lunch I would head over to my second technique class “Contemporary Caribbean” with Tania Isaac.  This class was built upon a highly challenging and unique repertory that blended modern principles with traditional social dances such as soca and reggae.  Taking this class expanded my horizons and tested my versatility as a dancer by providing me with a completely new movement vocabulary.  In addition to the technical aspects of my training, I was also able to further my career goals through a class on the business of dance with arts manager and administrator Kim Konikow.  Daily guest speakers from the festival faculty offered advice and wisdom based on their personal experience in the field and the culminating project required me to create and present a practical plan for achieving a future dance project.

One of the highlights of the festival for me was being selected to present a short piece of choreography for the Young Choreographers/New Works Showcase held the final weekend of the festival.  I recruited two fellow students who had traveled all the way from Colorado and New York to attend the festival, and together we created and performed a work titled “Fractured Identity.”  The work received positive feedback from the panel of faculty adjudicators and I was fortunate enough to make contact with a videography intern, who agreed to film it.  I will be using this feedback and video documentation as the seed for my senior thesis work in the fall, which will deal with the collision between Self and Other and what it means to be a stranger in a foreign place.  I plan to examine these issues through both an anthropological and personal lens, using my experiences living abroad in Mexico this past semester to inform my creative process.

This brings me to the second major highlight of the festival for me.  Networking at the festival allowed me to establish a relationship with a faculty member that had just returned from a year spent as a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico.  Inspired and encouraged by his work, I have made the decision to apply for the student Fulbright Scholarship in order to return to Mexico following graduation.  There I will be continuing research that I began this past semester on the place of traditional techniques in the emergence of a new dance movement in Mexico.  I envision my project as being a cross disciplinary examination of how we construct our identities in a globalizing world, with both a performance piece and written dissertation as the final product.

This workshop experience solidified my career choice and brought me to the realization that I truly want to act not only as an artist, but also as a voice for the arts.  The Bates Dance Festival has reignited my passion for my studies in dance and anthropology at Middlebury because I am able to see with greater clarity the value of being able to speak the language of two separate mediums.  Following my graduation I want to use the skills I have acquired during my time at Middlebury in order to communicate about and advocate for the importance of dance within our society as a marker of identity, community and culture.