By: Emily Ferro
Posted In: News
Photo credit: Stephanie Turaj
Courtney Randall (left) and Jillian Clifford leap into the air during their tech week rehearsal.
Salve Regina University has many clubs that cater to students with passions for surfing, the environment or even baking. Among these clubs, the largest club on campus is SRU Dance, which has consistently has over 100 members in recent years. Whether students have danced their entire lives or want to pick dance up as something new, the club allows everyone to take a class. Each semester students in the club put on a show open to students and the community, and the dance club shows have been sold out at the past few performances, held in Rodgers Recreation Center.
Salve Regina offers many different ways for people with a passion for dance to perform. The dance club guarantees a spot for anyone who want to dance, but there is also a dance company that holds yearly auditions. Extensions had their year-end performance a week before tech week began for the club performance. The time commitment between Extension and the club is definitely different, said Courtney Randall, sophomore dancer in both the club and Extensions. While the club rehearsals last only 45 minutes per dance, Extensions rehearsals are scheduled in three hour blocks, and dancers are often in three or four dances. “[Extensions] takes up our nights after class and most of our weekends,” said Randall, but she added that the work isn’t as grueling as it sounds. “It’s not like it’s work for us,” she said. “We all love it.” When it comes to performing, both the club and Extensions have a different focus. The Extensions show typically features dance pieces that are mainly contemporary, said Randall, and the club offers a wider variety of styles. This difference has a notable effect on the audience of each performance. Randall said that at the Extensions performance, the audience tends to be “subdued”. Randall also said that, “The audience is much more interactive with the dance club because so many more students go.” The audience members are not the only ones who are excited for this recital each semester – the dancers are just as anxious for the first night of the show. After undergoing “tech week,” a full week of nightly rehearsals for the show, the dancers are still eager. Sarah Fletcher, dancer and choreographer, said of the show, “I cannot wait.”
