With the end of the semester coming up quickly, the Theatre Arts and Dance department is debuting this year’s filmed senior projects as a weekend event the department is calling the “Senior Project Festival,” and will feature projects from seven theater and dance majors. 

The student-run festival will be streamed on May 6 through May 9, and attendees will be able to register online for free at the Theater Arts and Dance website. Each project will be shown twice and specific times can also be found on their website. 

Francelle Mariano, the production stage manager for the festival wrote in an email, “There are a total of 6 performances where we will see two senior projects per night and each pair gets two performances. We have a student written play titled “Ask Her Out!” shared with a co-directed dance piece titled “Change, Shift, Flow.” Then we have a play titled “Interviews with Loneliness,” shared with another dance piece called, “To Be Seen Is To Be Heard…This Is Who I Am!” Lastly, we have a play titled “Nine” combined with another student written play titled “What Now?”.”

“Seniors who wanted to participate created their own projects, and all actors auditioned collectively. The different directors then collaborated and negotiated who would get which actors based on those auditions and callbacks,” said actor Allison Dominguez, who performed in senior Lindsey Abbott’s production of “Nine”, written by Jane Shepard.

One of the dance projects, “Change, Shift, Flow,” co-directed by seniors Sierra Parkhurst and Brandon Leong, “consists of 9 new dance films that we choreographed, directed, filmed, and edited all ourselves… [and] explores concepts of water and the environment through an embodied lens,” according to Parkhurst.

The pandemic impacted their process, and getting to their final product required a lot more than good choreography and costumes due to the pandemic. 

“[It] involved a mix of Zoom and in person rehearsals, filming at different sights, and lots of editing. One of the pieces I made called “4 Million Acres” was danced by Rian Dixon who currently lives in Boulder, Colo. We choreographed everything on Zoom, I sent her filming and lighting equipment, she would film herself and send me all the footage which I would then edit. The whole process was really collaborative,” Parkhurst said. 

Leong explained how the project helped him expand his skillset. “I learned to choreograph, film and edit for dance works because it is so much more different than choreographing for stage and for live audiences. I feel like this whole process has made me more comfortable navigating a side of dance theater that I never explored before.”

Joelle Joyner-Wong, the playwright of “Ask Her Out” explained the challenges she faced while trying to create her project, as she’d written the play in 2019 and pictured it being performed on a stage, in-person. 

“The most challenging thing was figuring out how to film the project… covid happened and we had to figure out how to film. We at first were going to film it in person off campus with social distancing but the school said no because of health reasons. Then it was about should we add the green screen backgrounds to the green screen while they film or add them in,” said Joyner-Wong.

Overall, everyone involved felt their finished project turned out well, and the festival provides a way for students and faculty to celebrate graduating seniors who worked on the festival.

Annaliese Van Sickle, a student who also performed in “Nine”, said, “I’m so excited for everybody to see the final product… we all put our heart and soul into it… I know some of the other seniors that are doing their projects and it’s going to be the major is going to be a lot different without them.”