Dance and Percussion Students Team Up for a Vibrant Performance Intertwining Movement, Sound

On a chilly evening this semester, the UMass Dance Program and Percussion Ensemble united for “Elements: Movement & Sound,” a collaborative student performance featuring music by Garth Neustadter, Philip Glass, Jason Treuting and Iannis Xenakis, with Grammy-winning percussionist Glen Velez and friends, and storyteller and host Muriel Johnson.  

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Led by artistic directors Ayano Kataoka, professor of percussion, and Lauren Cox, jazz dance lecturer, “Elements: Movement & Sound” embraced the challenge of pairing dance with live music—an opportunity not often available to student dancers—to create a unique experience for both the audience and its student performers. 

“A lot of the dance was based off of musical cues,” says dancer Clara Franklin ’24. 

To prepare for opening night, students spent their fall 2021 semester enrolled in a UMass course under the Department of Music and Dance that served as rehearsal time. The dancers and percussionists first rehearsed independently, perfecting their sound and movement performances separately before coming together and seamlessly blending into one larger group. 

While the coordination between movement and sound didn’t happen right away, it provided a thrilling new experience for the student performers. Franklin recalled going up to a percussionist and asking “how many big booms before it changes” to get her timing right. Even when it was right, it still “felt a little different, sounded a little different, which is the nature of live art.” 

This aspect helped make “Elements” new each time they performed.  

Maddy Dethloff, also a second-year graduate student in percussion performance, says she appreciated the creativity of the dancers involved. 

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“The pieces that we were playing were pieces that I had known about already, but when the dancers put their choreography together, they put their own spin and interpretation on it, taking a piece that I knew and making it fresher,” Dethloff says. “I feel like the dancers really made it their own.” 

The choreography for the show was developed by UMass Dance faculty members Lauren Cox, Aston McCullough and Molly Christie González. 

“It was an incredible experience,” Franklin says. “It’s hard to go back and dance to a recording after that.” 

Elienishka Ramos Torres is a senior at UMass majoring in journalism and pursuing a minor in history. This year, she’s the editor-in-chief of the The Rebirth Project, an initiative that was started by Black journalism students in 2016 to encourage students of marginalized identities to share their stories. She also works at the Stonewall Educational Resource Center on campus as a programming assistant helping LGBTQ+ students through social and educational events. During her free time, Elienishka likes to watch cat videos.