Every spring, second-year BFA students in The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts perform in a solo showcase, after given one month to conceptualize and choreograph a three-to-four minute dance.
The BFA2 solos are highly anticipated as an opportunity for dancers to showcase their creative freedom, ability, and vision—a stepping-stone between the technique-heavy first year and the refinement later in a dancer’s time at CalArts.
With the prompt of “Sonder,” the students presented a wide range of movements and styles, including mime makeup; dancing in staccato; slow and weighty turning over of wood blocks; or buoyantly winking at the audience to a beat.
Megan Tehomilic (Dance 28) describes her interpretation of “Sonder:” The understanding that every passerby has a story that we tend to forget. For her choreography, she decided on “taking that in and trying to figure out what you’re doing and who you are. Flipping it back on its head and looking back in on yourself.”
Tehomilic chose to perform her dance with a live score, accompanied by Music student Nate Steckler on piano, to match her deliberate and classic movements. Tehomilic wanted to epitomize grace and performed in a floor-length, off-white dress.
“Throughout the piece, I look at the bottom of my foot and observe it,” Tehomilic says, “and then once I observe my foot, my foot touches my hand and then I start observing my hand, and it’s this very deep, intentional observation.”
Daelyn Phalen (Dance 28) reflects that upon hearing “Sonder,” she immediately knew that she wanted to hear directly from people in the community.
Phalen’s performance made use of an audio track composed of clips that she had recorded of friends and family members, answering interview questions about what love means to them. She used the answers she received to influence her choreography, responding to the musical voice clips with evolving emotion—escalating and falling through her body language and breath.
“My piece was very much oppositional: Here, I’m having a lot of tension, and then here I’m having a lot of flowing and more calm movement,” Phalen explains. “My whole point was to represent the opposition of love and hate in the body.
In her own piece, Tehomilic emphasized the “inviting” mode of performance. “I wanted it to feel like I’d created a world on stage and was giving the audience access into my life and I was giving a part of myself to them in that way.”
The dancers expressed how tension before the two nights of performances runs especially high, both because of the vulnerability of performing solo, and because of an expectation for the performers to show all of, and the best of, who they are in those three minutes.
For the dancers of the Class of 2028, the BFA2 solos offered a moment to reflect on how far they have come—and a glimpse of the artistic voices they are continuing to develop.
By Audrey Tucker
