DANCE DEDICATION
Senior Zoe McLaughlin’s piece is a special tribute to her mother who has shown Zoe and her sister Erin great love and affection despite not having received affection from her own mother while growing up.
Zoe uses the dance to portray her mother leaving home as a young woman to escape emotional neglect. Zoe chose to wear her mother’s blue sweater for the dance and even used her mom’s college T-shirt as a prop when depicting her mom packing a suitcase before departing from her cold family.
Zoe chose the 2022 song “Matilda” for the piece. In “Matilda,” Harry Styles sings: “You can throw a party full of everyone you know/ And not invite your family, ‘cause they never showed you love/ You don’t have to be sorry for leaving and growing up.”
The lyrics about not owing anyone an apology spoke to Zoe, but she said it was still hard to choose the right song. “I was debating whether I wanted to use one of her favorites or something that reminded me of her,” Zoe said. “I ended up choosing a song that made me think about her because I felt like I could tell a better story.”
Styles’ lyrics also include: “You talk of the pain like it’s all alright/ But I know that you feel like a piece of you’s dead inside/ You showed me a power that is strong enough to bring sun to the darkest days.” Although Zoe depicts pain in the dance, she mostly wants to celebrate her mom’s strength and capacity for love.
Zoe’s parents did not know about the dance, props or song before Thursday night’s opening concert. Zoe says her mom cried before the show just by reading the dedication in the program.
Although she choreographed the dance, Zoe serves as an actor rather than a dancer in the piece, allowing eight other dancers to highlight her mother’s complicated family history. Zoe’s sister, sophomore Erin McLaughlin, is also featured in the dance.
The choreography reflects years of generational hurt and healing. “My mom never hugged her mom, but I grew up always hugging my mom,” she said. “I think it’s still weird for my mom to have someone in her life who always wants a hug. She left home and so many people she loved behind, and she’s one of the bravest people I know. I wanted this piece to honor her strength.”
As a senior, Zoe is also thinking about an approaching scene in her own life. “My mom has always been my biggest supporter. And with me going off to college next year, I know that she is going to take that really hard. There will be difficulty letting go.” But, unlike her mother’s departure, Zoe’s will be celebrated with love…and hugs.
Senior Rio Gomez started dancing when she was age 2 and found her favorite style, tap, at age 9.
Growing up, Rio says her family often played the song “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone. “My parents love Nina Simone, and I’ve heard this song throughout my whole life, so it’s really cool that I get to do a dance to it.”
Gomez has become an ambassador for tap, trying to dispel the myth that tap is outdated or only for musical theater.
“My goal with my choreography is to show that tap can be modern and it can be commercial because when people think of tap, they think of old time Hollywood.”
For this piece, Gomez tells a story about a sinner man who goes before God and begs for his forgiveness for sinning. God ultimately turns him away and tells him to turn to the devil instead. During the contemporary portion of the piece, some dancers become spectators. Near the end, those people become one with the Sinnerman.
Gomez hopes to convey her message through this rare and interesting combination of two styles. “My dance conveys the story of the song and then also this idea that the pursuit of moral perfection is futile. And that trying to reach for this forgiveness from God and this perfection will only just lead to people turning against each other in violence and death.”
Unlike most dancers performing at tonight’s concert, senior Cytlaly Ruiz Velazquez has had a complicated relationship with dance.
Her parents “put” Cytlaly in Folklórico dance classes at age 8 because a neighbor recommended the activity, not because she wanted to join.
She says the dance was challenging at first but got easier. Then two years later, her parents pulled her from the program. “They felt like I didn’t like it, so they didn’t put me back in,” she said.
After a break, she asked to go back to Folklórico and finally both she and her parents were happy she was dancing. “They loved to watch me perform. They were my biggest supporters.”
But then Cytlaly “broke up” with Folklórico again freshman year. Although she’s taken FUHS dance classes all four years, she didn’t have the passion for Folklórico. “I fell out of love with it because my dance teacher [outside of school] made me not have fun anymore. My parents wanted me to stay with it, but I said no.”
Cytlaly says that FUHS dance teacher Andrea Oberlander frequently invited her to perform in the Folklórico style for concerts, but had always declined. That finally changed Thursday night when she surprised her family with a Folklórico performance in the auditorium. Her parents had no idea that Cytlaly had been planning and rehearsing the number for weeks.
“My senior came around and I was, like, I kind of want to surprise them,” said Cytlaly, who borrowed a Folklórico dress from a friend to keep the performance a secret. She says the dress is from the region of Hidalgo and the music is special to her. “The song talks a little bit of grief and how the singer misses someone and, you know, my family recently has gone through something like that. So I just kind of felt connected towards it.”
One thing Cytlaly wants everyone to know is that there are many different versions of Folklórico and so much about it to learn. “There are different varieties, it’s not just big skirts. There are also tiny skirts, and different boot varieties. There are also different regions that Folklórico came from. There’s not just one.”
Senior Andromeda Bruschke will join senior Rio Gomez tonight for a special tap duet produced as a sequel to last year’s dance concert number created with Laufey’s “From the Start.”
“Our idea was that it would be the sequel to the other dance, imagining 30 years later and we broke up but then we meet back up and I’m supposed to be mad at her character and we have this whole fight, but then at the end we’re friends again,” she said.
Romi is excited to share the piece with her family because she chose to choreograph the number using Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” which is her father’s favorite song. Like so many dancers, Romi recognizes the tremendous amount of support her family provides. It’s a joy to be able to honor her father with a song choice.
` Romi started dancing at age 3. Her first loves were ballet and tap, but now prefers lyrical and contemporary. She also does a little bit of jazz and hip hop.
“Contemporary, that’s my favorite style. It’s a lot more about creating shapes and focusing on breath with your movement rather than trying to pull out turns and tricks and stuff,” she said.
Romi is one of the three dance team captains and has definitely enjoyed her time dancing at Fullerton Union High school. She says the strength of the program is that her fellow dancers are friends not just peers.
“We’re all lifting each other up and are supportive of each other and I can tell everyone really cares about dance and that means a lot to me. Especially because we spend so much time together and we spend so much more time dancing. So it’s nice to know that everyone really has their heart in it.”
Romi is very excited for Friday’s closing night. She loves all the diverse pieces but recommends audiences look for senior Kennedy Molino’s dance. “I really like Kennedy’s piece. She choreographed a contemporary dance. It’s a really small group, but it makes it really fun to dance with these people. Most of them I’ve been dancing with the whole time I’ve been in high school and it has a lot of partnering, working together and it is a really nice way to get my emotions out because it’s a very sad and emotion-filled dance,” she said.
Andromeda Bruschke also recommends watching out for “Salem,” a piece directed by Mike Esperanza, an awarding-winning guest choreographer who worked with the dance team for about 30 hours during the summer.
“Salem” is a contemporary dance with 18 girls who represent Salem witches who are being hunted. “It’s supposed to have this magical feel and almost feel like a witch hunt,” Romi said. “And then at the end of the dance, we lift the other dance captain Kennedy [Molino] up in the middle. So it looks like a witch is being burned at a stake.”
The song for “Salem” is from the movie Black Panther and has no lyrics. It’s supposed to be a very rhythmic contemporary song. Bruschke said that the hardest part of the dance was figuring out the timing because most of the choreography was created in six counts compared to their usual eight counts.
Bruschke said she and other students thoroughly enjoyed working with Esperanza. “He’s definitely a very accomplished choreographer and it was really interesting seeing his style of choreography compared to what we’re used to. I feel like his movement quality for the contemporary style is more on the modern side, and it’s something that we don’t get to do a lot of here. He also did a lot of partnering and a lot of partner tricks that I’ve never seen before.”
