Three nights a week for the past two months, the Forbes dining hall has been home to more than rowdy freshman and broccoli stuffed chicken. While the rest of Princeton crams in reading and spits out problem sets, four or five women twist, stretch and leap over the dining room's hard wooden floors.
They are Vivacity, Princeton's newest dance group, dedicated to modern dance.
While many of the dance groups on campus use some form of modern dance, Vivacity is different because it focuses on that particular style of dance.
Born from the expressive movements of dance greats like Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey, modern dance is less structured than ballet, more angular than lyrical, and more emotional than hip hop or jazz.
It is sometimes, though not always, based around a concept that feeds the movements of the dancers. Ailey used his religious upbringing in Revelations, and a Vivacity piece is based on the experience of growing and retreating.
While ballet and hip hop are generally based on recombinations of a defined set of moves, modern dance generally aims to break movement conventions, using every part of the body to express emotion, play with images and respond to the other dancers.
"I want the audience to walk away feeling the emotions of the dancers," said Erin Langley '05, a Forbesian and founder of the group.
Despite this focus, Vivacity is still defining itself, experimenting with styles through group improvisational techniques.
Though Langley is the brains behind the project and the artistic director, she found that choreographing all of the group's pieces on her own was too much work, and ultimately, not what the group was about.
At each rehearsal, Langley brings in music like Donnell Jones, or the Dead Presidents soundtrack, and prepares the beginnings of dances. Through improvisation, the group creates the rest of the dance together.
One of the techniques they use is called "contact improv," where two or more dancers move together, one filling in the space the other has left behind. If a dancer does a back bend, for example, the other dancer might lean forward to counteract it.
This attention to the give and take of the dancers onstage is very characteristic of modern dance and of Vivacity's pieces thus far. One piece features a square of dancers doing sharp movements while a dancer moves fluidly and quickly inside the square; the dancers then trade places throughout the dance.
Another piece is based on a loose plot line where one dancer "rules" the others, directing their movements until the "puppets" begin to revolt against her. What is special about Vivacity, Langley said, its aim to showcase the strengths of the various dancers, letting each one's particular style become an important facet of the group. This will undoubtedly influence how the group evolves over the semesters to come.
But there have been some obstacles for Langley in creating the group.
She has had to organize the entire project alone, find people to audition on a campus full of activities, get a space rehearse and introduce the members to the kind of modern she wanted to pursue.
Group members Christina Rivera '05, Paulina Ortiz-Rubio '05, Kailee Erickson '05, Chika Anekwe '06 and Candace Mootoo '05 have all had some dance training, but none have had much experience with modern dance.
Langley hopes to change that by organizing trips to see groups like Alvin Ailey American Ballet Theater in New York or modern groups at the McCarter Theatre. She said she hoped that the USG would help with that financially, but since they cannot, she will have to find other ways.
Langley herself has been dancing since she was three, trying out everything from ballet to jazz to hip hop to Irish step dancing. She says that she use to often see modern dance groups at Skidmore, near where she lives in Saratoga, New York.
These experiences and a summer she spent teaching dance at her dance school in Saratoga convinced her to begin the group.
"I need to dance to be a balanced person" Langley said, adding that she hopes to "expose the campus and [Vivacity's] dancers to modern."
Vivacity hoped to have its first performance next fall, after the group has created a repertoire and secured a performance space. In the meantime, Langley may get funny looks from tired Forbesians trudging home past the dining hall on a Wednesday night, but no matter – that confused look may one day produce a new modern dancer.
If you are interested in modern dance, please contact Erin Langley at elangley@princeton.edu.
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