By Karen Gavis/se news editor
SE Campus dance students will enjoy a new spring in their step while preparing for the annual Dance Works concert Dec. 8-9.
The SE dance department has experienced tremendous growth and has recently moved into a new dance studio that features a spring floor, a new sound system and lots of light, SE dance instructor Jamie Perrin said.
“It’s better for joints and bones,” she said. “It’s much healthier for your body.”
Over the summer, SE made renovations in the art annex building. The dance department moved into its new studio at the beginning of the fall semester, going from 700 to about 1,700 square feet, Perrin said.
“It’s spacious, it has high ceilings and we have windows,” she said. “It is very inspiring for students to walk into that type of environment.”
SE liberal arts dean Jerry Coats has been a major factor in the growth of the dance department, and the new studio has really helped, Perrin said. The old studio had no windows.
“Even the door didn’t have a window in it,” she said. “It was just like being in a closet.”
Yet, there were no closets for dance costumes.
“The first couple of years, the closet was the guest bedroom in my house, in my car, under the stage,” she said. “So, now we have our own closet.”
Perrin did not tell her students about the new studio.
“I just brought them out here one day,” she said. “They just gasped.”
Perrin said she began teaching on SE in fall 2007. At the time, it was she and one adjunct. They had six classes and no dance concert. This spring, SE will offer 18 dance classes with four faculty members, a dance company and annual concerts. Each dance class has about 20 members.
“I think it has literally, like, tripled in five years,” she said.
Jenna Hindman, president of SE’s student dance ensemble, Rhapsody Movement Company, said the studio gives a whole new feeling while dancing.
“All of us love it,” she said.
Clery Moss, a new member of Rhapsody, said he loves to perform and thinks the new studio is great.
“I have never had so much fun on stage as when I am dancing,” he said.
SE adjunct Misty Owens said the dance department has a positive energy. Dancing is a whole new experience for most of her students, Owens said, and the new studio is liberating and inspiring.
“What a treat every day,” she said. “It is an invitation to dance.”
Dance concerts are performed at the end of every semester, and the upcoming Dance Works concert will be the department’s eighth concert, Perrin said.
It will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the C.A. Roberson Theatre. Students from all classes and Rhapsody will perform. Performances will be in jazz, hip-hop, modern, ballet and contemporary.
Tickets to the concert are free to TCC students, faculty and staff. General admission is $5 at the door. For more information, call Perrin at 817-515-3056 or email jamie.perrin@tccd.edu.
The next audition for Rhapsody will be at 7 p.m. Jan. 3 in the SE dance studio (EART 1101), Perrin said.
