Spring ’26 Dance Theses Showcase: Captivating Movements and Transformative Stories

Dance majors’ thesis performances and capstone projects drew a crowd at the ’92 Theater on Friday, March 27 and Saturday, March 28.

Ivan Lopez ’26, Tyler Schimpff ’26, Noelle Schultz ’26, D’Vine Straughter ’26, and Akhil Joondeph ’26 each showcased the dances that they had been choreographing for the past year. Each dance was striking and unique, with many combining the medium of film into their performance and others fusing multiple genres in their choreography. I left the theater struck by not only the talent exhibited on stage, but also by the way that the composition and themes prompted me to reflect on my own life. To more thoroughly understand the process behind the creation of these theses, The Argus sat down with Lopez, Schultz, as well as Meera Das ’26, one of the dancers in Joondeph’s thesis. 

Upon entering the ’92 Theater to sit down, the audience came across a woman sitting in a chair, putting on makeup and listening to music. This dancer set the scene for Lopez’s work, making the audience immediately feel part of the dance and breaking the fourth wall of the theater stage. When asked about the creative decision to break the boundaries between the audience and the performers, Lopez commented that the choice was rooted in the sociality of salsa dance. 

“I think the beauty of salsa and the social scene of salsa is that the fourth wall doesn’t exist,” Lopez said. “The sociality associated with salsa is so beautiful and so rich that I didn’t want to lose that once I got to the theater, because I think you tend to lose that in concert stage dance.”

The piece was centered around salsa dance and as all the dancers on stage joined together, I noticed the creative use of shawls and hats. They were central to the choreography, constantly being used in the movements while also, later in the dance, being exchanged between the dancers. The viewer was constantly caught following the shawl and hat as they transitioned from one person to another, or were used to wrap around the dancers’ bodies. Lopez described how the hat and the shawl were meant to signify the play between traditional ideas of salsa within the gender binary and the disruption of such ideas when the shawl was exchanged between people. This emphasis on exploring the gender binary, along with the history and culture of salsa, was central to Lopez’s work. 

“After reading so much on the history of salsa, and really involving myself [in researching] that world—knowing that salsa originated and is a diaspora modality coming from the islands Puerto Rico and Cuba, [before] coming to New York City, which is where it was popularized in the ’60s—I knew I wanted to pay homage and honor those two different worlds that I think are both very important or equally important to the development of salsa,” Lopez said.

In the midst of all of the dancing on stage, the audience was forced to reckon with the disruptive audio recording played in the background of the piece. The tape playing was a recording of Richard Nixon declaring that homosexuality is a sin and that society will collapse once it is permitted. Lopez highlighted the emphasis on the radio in both the Nixon tape and the physical radio which was central to the opening scene, centering the radio within the piece. 

“The radio is how salsa was popularized in the first place,” Lopez said. “It’s kind of like this cultural transmission between the islands and New York City, where salsa became so popular from companies like Vanilla Records that really marketed salsa to a bigger audience in New York City. So, the radio has become like a place for cultural transmission to occur. But also, on the other side, it has been a way for queerness to be censored.”

As the piece was coming to an end, my attention was drawn to the videos and images projected on the back of the wall. Childhood images of the dancers on stage, along with Lopez himself, were displayed on the screen, eliciting emotional responses from everyone in the crowd. When the montage ended, many people were teary-eyed or crying.

“I deliberately had some videos or pictures of them dancing [as children], because it’s dance without them having been introduced to the idea of queerness or the gender binary,” Lopez said. “They just dance to dance.” 

The medium of film, which had such a deep impact during Lopez’s piece, was also central to Schultz’s capstone project. This dance was the only solo of the night, with Schultz’s quality of movement being a highlight. Schultz described how she found inspiration for her piece in Audre Lorde’s essay “The Transformation of Silence into Action.”

“[Lorde’s] piece really spoke to a lot of the things that I was thinking about, which was mostly, like, self-silencing behaviors in black women, and how external society can put that pressure on you to not speak up, but it doesn’t really help you at all,” Schultz said. “In fact, it can really be hurtful to not just your mental health, but also your physical health. So I wanted to try to use dance to combat that, and also just have a celebration of fun and expression for myself.”

As Schultz moved across the stage with conviction and strength, video clips were projected behind her onto white blinds that she had constructed with the help of the Center for the Arts shop. As a film and dance double major, Schultz edited the videos together herself. She described how the videos were meant to capture what it meant to grow up as a young black girl during a digital time. There were clips from “Sesame Street,” “The Wiz” (1978), “The Last Dragon” (1985), and many more. 

“Being a film major, I’m invested in movies, and I’m invested in TV moments, and especially those that involve people who look like me,” Schultz said. “I was able to find a lot of representation in those when I was younger.”

Perhaps the most striking clip was from a Grace Jones music video where a black woman puts her hand on her mouth and moves slowly underground. At this moment, Schultz disappeared behind the shades, and the audience was left looking solely at the shades as the dance movement paused. 

“I felt like that [disappearing behind the curtain] was the perfect time for me to open up the portal, but also go behind it,” Schultz said. “And then the video kind of heats up a little bit. After a certain amount of time, I came back out and I was blindfolded…. That part of it is kind of a rebirth moment.”

The end of the piece conveyed joy and relied on audience participation. Schultz asked that anyone who felt comfortable can come up on stage to do the cha cha slide. At first, everyone was hesitant to join but slowly people started to walk on stage and take part in a communal moment.  

“I wanted the audience to get involved, to feel like they’re a part of this transformation as well,” Schultz said. “They’re gonna be, you know, transforming their silence into action as well.”

The courage to go up on stage and dance the cha cha slide allowed one to enter onto the dance stage. This broke the conventional separation of the audience and the dancer. Furthermore, having those who have no dance experience dance on the theater stage disrupted the conventions of who is allowed to take up space on a theater stage. 

At the end of the thesis showcase, the final dance performance was electrifying. Das described how Joondeph’s piece was centered on classical Indian dance and its history, while also finding ways to subvert that mold. Furthermore, she noted how Joondeph had worked with each of the dancers individually to find ways in which they could each connect with the piece on their own terms. 

“For me personally, I connected a lot with thinking about classical ballet and how [the dance] applied to my training in classical ballet,” Das said. “[Joondeph] really wanted to put a lot of emphasis on our own personal journeys, sort of breaking the mold of this supposedly pure art.… I think there were also a lot of themes of intimacy, exploring your own sexuality, [and] exploring fitting in versus not fitting in.” 

The layering of movement within Joondeph’s piece created a rhythm to the dance. Each dancer was seen doing different movements from one another at the same time on stage. This technique lent itself to an impactful juxtaposition of movements that still felt unified in their underlying strength. Das described one way in which Joondeph layered the dancers’ movements by giving improvisation prompts to the dancers.

“For example, he would say, okay, write your name in an improv, in a dance,” Das said. “We would have like 10 minutes to individually write our name through dance, and then he would bring that phrase, whatever we personally did, into the piece, over and again.”

This technique reflected on stage. However, something which disrupted the feeling of individuality within the piece was the use of masks. Each dancer on stage wore a mask that covered the bottom half of their face. This costuming choice created an uncanny feeling to the dance, where even if the dancers on stage were doing different movements, one was unable to easily discern who each person was. 

It was not until one dancer took off her mask during a solo that all the other dancers joined on stage without a mask on as well. There was something joyful in that release; it created a feeling of freedom for the audience. 

All of the dances in the thesis showcase depicted uniquely personal themes. These themes carried with them messages that the audience could grasp onto and relate to in a personal way, such as the joys of childhood, the feelings of not wanting to be silenced, or the urge to break free from the binaries that govern our lives. It struck me as a display of how dance has the power to change the way one thinks about the world. 

Amelia Haas can be reached at ahaas01@wesleyan.edu.