Dance-Apalooza moves to everything from classical to Hendrix

The range of music and choreography styles in the 2009 Dance-Apalooza looks like the iPod of a schizophrenic music lover. The dances range from a 20-minute Bach piece to a four-minute hip-hop routine separated by interpretive pieces and tap dancing.

Four faculty choreographers and one guest choreographer wrote nine dance pieces for this year's show. Twenty-nine dancers and 29 faculty and students for scene, lighting and costume design round out the program.

The "Sonata for Five in Fours" by Johann Sebastian Bach features violinist Brandon Christensen, a professor in the Department of Music at Southeast Missouri State University. Christensen stands on the stage, playing the Baroque piece while four dancers leap and pirouette around him.

Christensen and choreographer Dr. Marc Strauss said they have talked about collaborating on the Bach piece for years. Christensen has been practicing "Sonata for Five in Fours" for a year, and Strauss, a professor of theater and dance, began forming and teaching the dance in August.

The 20-minute song is split into four movements, making it feel like four related pieces instead of one long piece. When the spinning and dancing start to blur together, you notice the man playing onstage. Just when you get bored with the song you realize those layers of harmony are coming from one instrument. Then you notice the four dancers again, playing like little girls who stumble upon a secret violin practice. It never gets old.

The show immediately switches gears into a three-person tap piece by Lees Hummel, an assistant professor of theater and dance at Southeast. Hummel normally writes one or two longer pieces, but said she wanted to challenger herself this year with different dance styles. Her three short pieces are tap, hip-hop and jazz/swing.

"I just wanted to challenge myself and not have to think of this epic piece with a beginning, a middle and an end," Hummel said.

Hilary Peterson, a dance instructor at the university, choreographed a humorous piece about the joy and danger of chewing bubble gum for one of her two pieces. The six dancers wear the most colorful costumes of the night, each article a different color. They blow bubbles, have gum stuck in their hair and end the dance stuck to the floor because of the sticky substance.

The light-hearted piece leads into a pounding hip-hop routine with Desmond Gray, Andrew Kruep and Rachel Ann Richter pop and locking to Lupe Fiasco's "Go Go Gadget Flow."

Hummel added a shadow screen to the piece so the dancers look two-dimensional for part of the song. The result is sharp lines and larger-than-life images.

Phillip Edgecombe, a dance instructor at Southeast and the fourth faculty choreographer, wrote two pieces, one of which has Hannah Bagnall, McKenzie Gilliam, Kristin Hloben and Yan Lu dancing to Jimi Hendrix.

"I've been waiting to do Jimi Hendrix for a while," Edgecombe said. "... I like the music."

The guest choreographer, Robert Battle, wrote the final piece and taught the nine student dancers the routine in October when he was here with his Battleworks Dance Company.

The percussive piece mixes African dance with militant and robotic modern movements.

"Rush Hour" uses music by John Mackey to visually describe the feelings of traffic in New York City, according to an artist statement.