Nicola Ferro '23 works with Professor Nigel Semaj, and dance students Ruthy Freeberg and Erin Zotomayor
Nicola Ferro '23 works with Professor Nigel Semaj, and dance students Ruthy Freeberg and Erin Zotomayor
Allentown, PA (10/23/2022) — Despite the intrinsically queer nature of musical theatre as a genre, explicitly queer stories are rarely seen on stage. Inspired by the 1963 musical overflowing with queer subtext 'She Loves Me,' 'Dear Friend' is a project examining the potentials of queer storytelling through combining genres to create something new. Nicola Ferro's '23 research consists of both academic research focusing on dance history and performance studies, as well as embodied research towards creating new movement that blurs the lines between different codified dance styles. The project will culminate in a choreographed performance told through the structure of a visual playlist, in which music, theatre, and dance all play equal roles in storytelling. I'm excited to continue my research of gender and sexuality in the performing arts, both explicitly through story content and implicitly through genre and structure.
"This process has taught me so much about dance research as a field. I dug for video archives and discovered how inaccessible a lot of archives of marginalized groups are, and learned how important community and collaboration is not just for my process, but for all of dance history."
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