New Dance Melded With Old
by Scott Weaver

Choreolab, Juliana May’s senior dance show, will be a sort of retrospective, combining old pieces from the past three years with newly created works. Though Winter Term served as a time for intensive rehearsing, we will have to wait because the show is scheduled to go up on May 3 and 4 in Hall Auditorium.
Choreolab will be the culmination of a process begun during May’s first year at Oberlin when she performed a work called “Pedestrian Crossing.” Susan Miller, the former head of the Cleveland Repertory Project, a professional dance company in Cleveland, saw the performance and asked for a tape. Just last year they acquired the piece and asked May to come in and put “Pedestrian Crossing” on for the company. Along with senior Emily Strout, who served as rehearsal director, May traveled to Cleveland three times a week during Winter Term to show the work to the Rep. Project. The company will be performing the piece first in Choreolab in May and then one week later in Cleveland. This was May’s first time working with a professional company, and she was very excited and honored to have had the opportunity.

When she wasn’t in Cleveland, May worked with a group of Oberlin dancers on two other pieces, a reconstructed version of the In Between Spaces and an untitled trio. Juliana finds the combination of working with both old and new works a difficult and interesting process. While seeing how her conceptions of space, content and form in regards to choreography have changed over the past few years, she sees Choreolab as a step forward without forgetting the work she’s done in the past.

Not only is she working with dancers in both Oberlin and Cleveland, but May is also collaborating with fifth-year TIMARA student Jim Altieri on the trio (the music from which will be part of his senior recital). This collaborative process is all part of the plan for Choreolab, which started at the Trevor Day School in NYC where Choreolab was the name of her high school dance concert. As May collaborates with dancers and composers she is continuing to uphold the tradition of Choreolab as a laboratory for dance making.