When Kamille Upshaw arrived at The Juilliard School in 2007, she’d been a competition dancer for a decade. “There was still a bit of a stigma about competition dancers,” says Upshaw, who attended Baltimore School for the Arts and trained at Spotlight Studio of Dance in Millersville, Maryland. “We were seen as being all about […]
“I was a little too ambitious when I made my first piece,” Wade Schaaf remembers, with a laugh. Schaaf, now a member of Thodos Dance Chicago, struggled with his choreographic debut, a piece for the Omaha Theater Ballet. “I was so nervous that I had everything choreographed in advance, almost down to each breath the […]
Contemporary choreographer Jessica Lang has a flair for the dramatic. Whether she surrounds her dancers with large, realistic set pieces or places them in a more abstract stage world, her choreography is passionate and the performers’ emotions are almost tangible. Lang, a Julliard graduate who performed with Twyla Tharp’s company, explains, “It’s not that I […]