Faculty artist Kelly Hirina and seven Dance BFA undergraduates travel to the Netherlands in July for a month-long summer study abroad program at ICK Amsterdam, the dance company led by Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten, as well as working with dance artists at Henny Jürriens Studios (HJS), one of Europe’s leading training centers for freelance dance professionals.
A Fulbright scholarship took Hirina to Amsterdam where she worked, as a freelancer and company member, with Greco and Scholten, as well as choreographers Suzy Blok, Krisztina de Châtel, and Dylan Newcomb prior to coming to Peabody. She understands the creative possibilities that can be unlocked by seeing and experiencing different movement and performance ideas. “When I originally arrived to Amsterdam,” Hirina says, “I was delightfully surprised to see how different the values were in dance technique as well as the theatrical influence including spoken text, set design, and props in performances.”
The program is made possible through the Johns Hopkins Global Education Office and the students—Gwen Bergendahl, Kayla DeLise, Iva Lin, Lily Perry, Jillbeth Rivera Sanchez, Micah Shapiro, and Ceci Sun—will study ICK Amsterdam’s Double Skin/Double Mind movement method, explore choreographic concepts, and learn repertoire from the company. At HJS, they will learn repertoire from esteemed choreographers such as Jiri Kylian and Akram Khan from well-known dancers.
In addition to their dance studies, students get to drink in Amsterdam’s rich cultural life: visiting museums to see the Dutch masterworks of Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, the Stedelijk Museum’s Marina Abramovich retrospective of the performance artist’s genre-defying works, and new media exhibitions, in addition to a robust variety of professional dance performances that rarely, if ever, tour the mid-Atlantic region.
Dancing with, learning from, and witnessing the larger contemporary dance community provides students new tools, ideas, and methods that they can incorporate into their own creative practices. “Though choreographic time in the US is often much shorter, I try to instill the investigative, research, and refinement methods that I learned while being in creative processes as a dancer in Europe,” Hirina says. “This approach not only supports dancers interested in choreography, but also dives deeper into a performer’s qualities, artistic potential, and expressivity rather than form and image.”
In July, Rebecca Lee (BFA ’23, Dance) performs a solo work at the Contemporary Dance Choreography Festival in Orlando, Fla. The solo is a work that Dance BFA chair danah bella set and Lee performed her senior year for the Peabody Dance Ensemble and throughout the country after graduating. Last month, Lee performed an excerpt of a work-in-progress at the Queer MVMT fest in San Diego, part of a larger project she aims to showcase in Los Angeles within the next year. The Heidi Duckler Dance Education Director is a Teaching Artist with P.S Arts and performer with the HDD company, as well as BrockusRED Dance Company and TORRENT, and she reviews dance for the LA Dance Chronicle.
Dance students Kayla Delise, Victoria Thomas, and Andrew VanAllen work as apprentices this summer for Nickerson-Rossi Dance, the Palm Springs, California, dance studio founded by dance artist/choreographer, and faculty member Michael Nickerson-Rossi.
Ui-Seng Francois (BFA ’23, Dance) is dancing as part of the first national tour of MJ the Musical, featuring a book by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage and Tony Award-winning choreography from director Christopher Wheeldon, which kicked off in Boston in June and continues through August 2025.
Dance artist and educator Eliana Rose Krasner (BFA ’22, Dance) debuted her “. . . as the wind . . .,” featuring music by Novo Amor and Scott Li (BM ’20, Computer Music Composition and Recording Arts) and performed by Krasner and Chase Benjamin (BFA ’22, Dance) , as part of San Diego Theater’s 2024 Emerging Choreographers Showcase and Awards in early June. She begins a Masters of Arts in Teaching program at San Diego State University this fall.
Rush Johnston (BFA ’22, Dance), featured in the spring 2024 Peabody magazine mentorship feature, recently announced that this fall they are returning to the Barnard Movement Lab where they debuted the first act of their three-act work Unfettered—a multidisciplinary performance that explores the relationship between transness and divinity through the lens of Johnston’s transition—for the debut of Act II, a 90-minute reflection and rebirth with an all-queer cast.
In late June, Kayla Laufer (BFA ’23, Dance) premiered her new “Harmonic Fusion” at the Young Choreographer’s Festival in New York City; it was be performed by herself and Harry Sukonik (BFA ’23, Dance) with viola provided Anna Jarboe (BM ’23, Violin).
Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lébron (BFA ’23, Dance) presents “Cuir (Queer) Reggaetón and the Call for Cuir (Queer) Embodied Puerto Rican Identity” in the Queer Dance Hub at the 2024 Dance Studies Association Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 23-27, 2024. She will also be an artist-in-residence at the Croft Residency in northern Michigan in July, working with Sophia Perone (BFA ’24, Dance), Kayla Laufer (BFA ’23, Dance), and current Peabody student Marie-Amelle Thenoz, collaborating on a piece to be premiered in March 2025 at RAD Fest.
Harry Sukonik (BFA ’23, Dance) recently joined Jennifer Muller/the Works, the company created by the prolific choreographer and dancer Muller, who passed away in 2023. Zoë Brielle Payne (BFA ’23, Dance) finished a season with Washington National Opera, performing in Turnadot. She joins the West Virginia Dance Company for its 2024-25 season.
Leah Logsdon Carpenter (BFA ’24, Dance) is producing a summer dance festival in New Orleans. Taylor Knighton (BFA ’24, Dance) joins Dayton Contemporary Dance Second Company for its 2024-2025 season. Stephanie Marco (BFA ’24, Dance) is joining Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines as a dancer.
Incoming first-year dancer Helena Merlino is a 2024 High School Finalist in the New Century Dance Project Choreography, New Mexico’s festival of performance and choreography that takes place July 29 to August 4. Merlino is one of the 17 high school, undergraduate, and emerging professional choreographers to be showcased in the festival’s New Voices Concert.
Faculty artist Diedre Dawkins was recently featured in the May issue of Bold Journey Magazine. And department chair danah bella will be in residence with the Bellingham Repertory Dance Company in Washington later this summer.