By Sarah SumadiThe Daily Northwestern
VITAL Dance Theater Company begins rehearsal like any other campus dance troupe, with stretching and ballet exercises at the barre. They end rehearsal, however, with prayer.
The company aims to spread Christian gospel through a blend of ballet and modern dance, as well as to create a haven for dancers seeking an alternative to secular and sexual choreography.
“We’re called to use whatever talents God gave us for His glory,” said founder and president Jená Lowe, a Communication junior. “So we’re using dance, something universal that everyone can relate to, to show that Christ can be universal.”
The group was created earlier this year when Lowe recruited Communication senior Laura Duelfer as vice president. The two held auditions in late September. The group now has nine members who have rehearsed together three times.
Both Lowe and Duelfer have extensive dance training – Lowe in modern and Duelfer in ballet – and have struggled with reconciling their love for dance with how sexualized it has become. VITAL, they said, draws a line between being aware of the body and sexualizing the body. It uses movement to praise God, not to draw attention to the performers, they said.
“I think, as dancers, we can be sexual and sensual without defining ourselves as sexual beings,” Lowe said.
Company member Allyson Jacobs, a Communication junior, said she has been uncomfortable in the past with some choreography and costumes.
“I never felt right performing crude movements to crude lyrics,” Jacobs said. “But with VITAL, I’m so happy to be dancing without worry in my heart that I’m exploiting my body.”
Lowe said she wants the troupe’s dancers to be as strong technically as they are spiritually, and so the group practices for two hours twice a week, beginning each rehearsal with an hour of ballet and modern technique exercises.
“I wanted to take Christian dance, which is usually something with long white sleeves, white leotards and the same movements over and over again, and turn it into something that was artistically engaging, something dancers could go to for dance’s sake,” Duelfer said.
Lowe and Duelfer said some of the dancers are still a little rough around the edges. For their new troupe, they focused on finding talent with potential and a commitment to their message.
In the group’s collaborative choreography process, members complete themed writing assignments and match movements to those ideas during rehearsal.
A recent assignment spawned a piece of collaborative choreography about alcoholism, in which the company dances to Nina Simone’s “If He Changed My Name” and tries to evoke drunkenness through uneven movements.
That piece might be part of a VITAL show during Reading Week, which will focus on three characters struggling with an issue and how Christ helps them overcome it.
Duelfer is a dance major, and after seeing how Christianity was often demonized in her dance classes, she hopes VITAL can bridge the gap between conservative Christians and liberal artists.
“Christianity gets bashed in dance as something that has made people reluctant to express themselves for fear of being called a sinner,” Duelfer said. “We want to show that Christianity can be universal and doesn’t necessarily make you socially conservative or Republican.”
To help clarify its message, VITAL is planning to include short explanatory notes in its program. But while Duelfer and Lowe make that concession to the need for words, they said dance has special advantages for spreading the Gospel.
“Christianity is more about showing rather than telling, and dance is perfect for that,” Lowe said. “You can avoid the ambiguity of words and really show what you mean through movement.”
Reach Sarah Sumadi at [email protected].
