DIEGO SANTOS
Movers Unlimited Dance Company performs “Gee: of the Earth Within,” dance at the Fort Worth Dance Festival on Oct. 3.
Dance teams from NW and NE campuses performed at the Fort Worth Dance Festival on Oct.5, showcasing a variety of solo and group dances.
The three-day festival, hosted by I.M. Terrell Academy, aimed to celebrate community and offer exposure to different professionals and dance platforms in the Fort Worth area.
After joining the NW Mosaic Dance Project and competing with them for about six years, NW student Hunter Robinson performed his first solo dance at the event.
Robinson said dancing makes him feel free, helps with his emotions and makes use of the muscle memory. He said movement is medicine for him.
“It really makes me use my brain, and keep myself in check, like be in the moment and just let the music take control,” he said.
Robinson’s solo, “The Space Within,” is about the amount of space around him and what he is able to do with that space.
“I could move to the corner, the side, the center or mid-center. I could do anything,” he said.
Robinson said he doesn’t go by the rule that practice makes perfect. He said he’s perfectly imperfect. For him, practice makes progress.
Robinson also performed with five other Mosaic dancers, including NW student Ana Higa, to the song “Solid Ground” by Michael Kiwanuka.
“It’s the contrast between how people see you, or how people feel around you, and how you feel around them,” Higa said.
She said Kiwanuka talks about individualism and whether being alone could be a good or bad thing.
“I try to express whatever I feel the song is about, or whatever I feel that I need to express in that moment, depending on the vibe of the song and the choreography,” she said.
Higa said it would be great if the audience knew exactly what it is she tries to interpret, but everyone thinks differently.
“If they have a different idea, or they saw something different in the dance, it’s pretty interesting, because it’s different experiences that can affect the way we think about certain stuff,” she said.
Another Mosaic dancer, NW student Emily Frost, said she wasn’t nervous about the dance at all. In fact, performing is what she’s passionate about.
“It helps me have a lot more self-control and self-discipline,” she said. “It really helped me with my sense of confidence as well.”
Amy Jennings, NW associate professor of dance and the director of the Mosaic Dance Project, said she thought the group performed well. She said they just learned “The Edge of the World,” this semester.
“It’s really great to see them take the stage, own the stage,” she said.
Jennings said Robinson had worked with a new choreographer from SE Campus, Giancarlo Mendez, and it was a great collaboration.
“That’s one of the things that we love about the work that we do,” Jennings said. “We bring in a new choreographer so our dancers try on new works.”
Jennings said she watched Robinson grow over the years and thought he deserved a solo. She said she was proud of his work.
“It was really nerve-wracking,” Robinson said. “But once I got on stage and started doing the movements, it vanished. In order to be brave, you have to be scared.”
NE Movers Unlimited Dance Company closed the first day of the festival with a 15-minute performance titled “Gee: Of the Earth Within.”
Kihyoung Choi, a NE dance professor and director of Movers Unlimited, explained that the dance imitates the struggle of coping with difficulties in life. She said that it is physically strenuous and would push the dancers to their absolute limits.
Because of this, however, she said it brings the dancers extremely close together and creates a strong bond of unity and movement as one on the stage.
“You can see toward the ending that they just reach the extreme fatigue, but they just kept going just because they have each other,” she said. “There’s some beautiful moments as a performer, as a choreographer and also as an audience. When I see them, that’s really what’s striking to me.”
NE adjunct dance instructor Najwa Seyedmortez, who was among the dancers performing at the festival, was a student under Choi in 2013 and returned to TCC to help teach dance.
What kept her coming back to dance was her experience with Movers Unlimited and the almost unexplainable feeling of catharsis dancing on the stage with the company.
“Once you taste it, you cannot forget. You keep searching for that,” Seyedmortez said.
She said that the feeling starts when dancers have pushed themselves past the brink of effort.
“When you completely use up all the energy, it’s so weird that your body itself starts to move by yourself,” she said.
NE associate professor of dance and Movers Unlimited dancer Hyun Jung Chang explained that she was most excited to connect with others.
“We’ve been working really hard for this moment, so I’m just really looking forward to the first breath on stage together,” she said just before the performance.
NE dance student Ethan Bui said he was ready to create new memories with the dancers and was happy to find out that his parents would be in the audience to watch his performance for the first time.
“I’m excited to feel everybody’s presence on stage,” he said. “It’s going to be way different than what we had practiced, and I feel like it’s just more I feel more connected when you know you’re actually performing.”
To prepare for the dance, Choi said that the dancers gather together right before approaching the stage and take a breath together, creating a feeling of unity and calamity.
Dancer Kevin Juarez said that he was focused and ready right before the performance, and afterwards he felt the team had completed the mission they set out to do.
“We want the audience to walk away satisfied, to think about the show and what each piece meant, not just ours,” he said. “We want them to think about it throughout the week, and to know that there are people out there taking all types of crafts –– especially dance –– seriously. And it’s unifying people at a time like this.”