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USF dancer Sarah Allen practices in the Lone Mountain ballroom for the dance program’s ensemble performance this year. The program is getting a new home in the Koret Health and Recreation Center.
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Dance Program Gets New Home
A campus space utilization plan to overhaul Campion Hall and refurbish part of Lone Mountain has given the USF dance program a brand new home.
The 36-year-old program, which has used the Lone Mountain ballroom for much of its lifetime as a classroom and rehearsal space, will be housed in a professional studio in the Koret Health and Recreation Center starting this fall.
“It’s wonderful that the university is recognizing the work that dance is doing,” said Kathileen Gallagher, associate professor of Visual and Performing Arts and coordinator of the program. “It’s a brand new day.”
Dance has been a part of the USF curriculum since 1968, initially as an elective in exercise and sport science and now as an emphasis and minor in the Performing Arts and Social Justice major. In its infancy, the program used the floor of Memorial Gym after gymnastics class, requiring the dancers to push the trampoline and uneven bars off the floor before they could practice. For the last 26 years, the lofty Lone Mountain ballroom has been an adequate home.
Last fall, however, after the announcement of a campus-wide renovation plan recast the ballroom as an extension of the Lone Mountain residence halls starting in 2005, three of the five underused racquetball courts on the bottom floor of Koret were suggested as a permanent dance space. With built-in bars, standardized lighting, and a properly sprung dance floor, the room will meet professional standards. An administrative office will also be built and a mezzanine added in a future phase, said Laura McCarty, director of project management.
The new space should be an appropriate home for a program that has been carefully built into one of San Francisco’s most active dance programs. Today, the program is an integral part of the university’s blossoming performing arts and social justice major, in which students take a core curriculum of acting, dance, and technical theater classes before choosing an emphasis in one. The dance program also trains 35 minors.
Classes in dance appreciation and composition, ballet, modern, jazz, hip-hop, Broadway musical style, Latin, swing, and Flamenco are taught by Gallagher and eight adjunct faculty, and master classes are regularly held with such varied stars as Michael Smuin, former artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet, Grammy award-winning percussionist Babatundi Olatunji, and Robert Moses, director of KIN dance company.
The program also runs a dance outreach initiative in collaboration with the Presidio Performing Arts Foundation. USF dance students can earn university credit teaching weekly dance classes to children from Bret Harte Elementary School in San Francisco’s Bayview/Hunter’s Point district. Other USF students teach more advanced classes at the Presidio Dance Theater. The classes will be performing this year at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center and the Palace of Fine Arts.
But for most of the dance students, it’s not what they do for the program that counts but what the program does for them. At the annual dance ensemble performance in Presentation Theater last month, 32 dancers performed five pieces choreographed by four adjunct faculty. The capacity crowds stood and applauded at the end of each show.
“It’s always wonderful when the audience appreciates the hard work and dedication that go into making the show,” said Sherene Bretschneider, a performing arts and social justice major.
Bretschneider said discipline and focus are required for her heavy dance schedule, which this year included ballet class three times a week and rehearsals five hours a week for the ensemble performance. She has also taught in Bayview as part of the USF dance outreach program and helps recruit students for the Presidio Foundation program.
“Dance classes are extremely important for teaching discipline and expressing yourself in ways other than through words,” she said. “The discipline and focus required carries over into your other classes.”
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