Nine young women will reflect on their pasts through modern dance tonight.
Inversions Modern Dance Company will present their annual spring showcase, called “Recollections,” in the Sonja Haynes Stone Center auditorium at 7 p.m. tonight.
The performance, which will feature all student choreographed works, will be free and open to the public.
This year, Inversions is giving all donations to the Be Loud! Sophie Foundation, an organization that aims to support adolescent and young cancer patients and their families at UNC Hospitals. Niklaus Steiner, the director of the Center of Global Initiatives at UNC, started the foundation after his daughter Sophie passed away from cancer at age 15.
Inversions's president Rachel Holtzman, a senior health policy and management major, said because Steiner is one of her academic mentors, she wanted profits from “Recollections” to go to a meaningful cause.
“Bring your friends and come support the arts on campus and young adult cancer patients at UNC Hospitals,” Holtzman said.
Inversions’s Vice President Victoria Petermann, a junior women’s studies major, has been dancing for Inversions for three years.
Petermann said Inversions encourages a lot of exploration and experimentation through its dancers’s choreography.
“A lot of our work is very personal and sometimes it’s not,” Petermann said. “Sometimes it feels really special because we form a real community since we are such a small group.”
Holtzman said what’s great about Inversions is that the dancers share leadership. She has never choreographed a dance in all four years, but she arranges events and the logistics of performances for the group.
“At the beginning of the year, we asked who wanted to choreograph but by the beginning of fall semester, about half of our pieces were done,” Holtzman said.
Inversions will perform seven pieces at their spring show. Holtzman said there is a wide variety to how some pieces are arranged or performed.
“What’s really neat about this show is some pieces have multiple components and are much longer, but some are really short.”
Sophomore Sarah Bird choreographed her first piece for the entire group for this year's show. Bird said the piece she choreographed was inspired by the show “Mad Men” and Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”
“It’s about the two of those and how they are similar,” she said. “I played with the idea of your inner savage, as well as feminine power,” she said.
Bird said the name “Recollections” was a group effort. It came out of the pieces the group choreographed at the beginning of the year fairly collectively.
“It’s about memory and being able to tap into sense of style, but also the way we connect and reach into ourselves,” Bird said.
Holtzman said throughout all of the pieces, there’s an element of remembering. She said she hopes people have fun watching the show, and that they walk away remembering some pieces.
Holtzman also said that although Inversions performs modern dance, she thinks people should care about the arts in general.
“I think everyone is drawn to a different form of art,” she said. “For some people, it can mean the rhythm of their breath when they run, for others it can be fly-fishing and for some people, it can be dance.”
arts@dailytarheel.com
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