Dance Magazine ranks The University of Oklahoma’s school of dance as one the top three dance schools in the country. Each year The Young Choreographers' Showcase gives the top 10 student choreographers a chance to show off the skills they have learned.
Emma Sadler sits crisscross against the giant mirror in the dance studio of the second floor of the Reynolds Performing Arts Center in Norman. She looks on with concern and delight as she analyzes the graceful, fluid movements of the five young women who are finally bringing her vision to life. It is hard to imagine that the idea behind the elegance and wonder of this dance came from a not-so graceful moment.
Sadler explains she discovered a song during her summer in New York City. “I would sit in the subway every morning at 7 and just listen to it on repeat and there was one time that I was just so stuck in the song, and stuck in a daydream that I wasn’t paying attention and the subway came to a stop and I got completely hurled from my seat. And so I just wanted to kind of want to play with that whole concept of being absolutely stuck in a daydream.
“I tried to think about how I like to daydream," Sadler says. "And I’m very much a person that likes to sit under a tree and look around and, you know, draw clouds in the sky and then I just started thinking, when I was listening to this song I could see this whole dance unravel in front of my eyes.”
The five dancers all gracefully fall to the floor; lie on their backs, and whimsically trace invisible pictures with their fingers in the sky.
"It’s just happy," Sadler says. "I didn’t want any kind of deep contemplative concept I just I wanted my girls to be happy and I wanted the audience to look at it and just kind of feel at peace and feel like they’re in the clouds.”
Manuel Valdes, Sadler’s fellow choreographer and sophomore dance major at the University of Oklahoma has seen Sadler’s rehearsals.
“I almost was brought to tears because the girls just, you can just see, the passion that she put into them and into the dance and it just makes them flow so much like the clouds,” Valdes observes.
Valdes and Sadler are preparing for the Young Choreographers' Showcase. This is the second year that Sadler’s piece has been selected for the show, but Valdes says he is taking on his first showcase, and it has a very different feel.
“What mine is about is journeying through the darkest chasm, which is the abyss to me," Valdes says. "So when I was choreographing it for them, I tried to make all these different patterns where they’re stuck and this darkness is pulling them in and they cant get out but they’re fighting to get out but then they have this moment where the light kind of shines down on there, and they can feel it and they’re reaching for it but they can’t quite get it yet.”
Valdes says this idea has come from months of obsessing over the piece.
“I honestly think that you never stop working, we come in and go through each day thinking about our piece," Valdes says. "We could be in our technique class and we’ll be thinking about our piece, sitting there like oh my God this could happen in this part, and we go to sleep and dream about it, or like how she daydreams about her piece. It just comes to wrap, like you never really stop shaping it.”
But Sadler says that the work is more than just daydreams, it’s about building a seamless relationship.
“It’s definitely been an interesting experience choreographing with five girls because you have to think about not only how five of them relate to the audience but how they relate with each other as well," Sadler says. "You’re making a relationship between each girl and between the audience and between the stage and so you kind of have to think about that whole process.”
And she said this relationship is what has made her vision a reality.
“I never go in knowing what I’m going to do and so every rehearsal I would always feel really happy about how it went, I would just go off of how they were feeling and their energy and we all created a really beautiful piece together," Sadler says.
The Young Choreographers Showcase preforms January 22nd through the 25th in the Reynolds Performing Arts Center on the University of Oklahoma campus.
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