Alan Obuzor – Artistic Director Choreographing on Point Park University

Hi All,

This is Alan Obuzor here!

I am choreographing a new piece for Point Park University (PPU) which will be performed by their students on the upcoming weekends of Nov 11th-13th & 18th-20th. 

The whole process started this summer when Susan Stowe asked me to choreograph a piece this fall for PPU's “Contemporary Choreographers” program. I had choreographed a piece in 2006 for PPU so I was familiar with the caliber of their dancers and jumped at the opportunity.

Since summer I’ve been looking for music and thinking about what kind of a piece I wanted to do. I  decided that I most likely wanted to do a medium to large ensemble piece that had a variety of music and movement throughout the piece. But a lot of ‘making a piece’ comes from the dancers and I didn’t personally know most of the current PPU dancers.  So I did some planning…….but most of it had to wait till I had dancers.

The audition process started Friday(8 days ago) with a whirlwind of an audition where Kelsey (my rehearsal assistant for this piece) and I had just three hours to choose from around 120 students. For the audition I taught a short section of choreography that I madeup for this piece. In the audition it was great to see so many different kinds of dancers to choose from.

The day after auditions I had the dancers I selected for seven hours in the studio which included callbacks and actually getting started on the piece. All of my dancers are really great to work with! They are hardworking, eager to please, and ready to try anything! The dancers are eating up my choreography, it is great to see them take my steps and make them their own, but to also push them to move in different ways.

As you can maybe tell I am getting really excited about this piece! We are a little over a week into the rehearsal process and everything is really starting to take shape. This ballet has 5 selections of music from 4 different artists and I like that it visually matches that in diversity. Each section has its own distinct feel to it and can stand alone as a piece on its own, yet I think they all blend together to make a cohesive work.

There are 10 women and 6 men in a cast, as of now my piece doesn’t have a title………. but you should definitely come check out a show, I think it is gonna be a really good one!


For tickets visit:

http://purchase.tickets.com/buy/TicketPurchase?organ_val=22105&event_val=DAN2&schedule=list


Alan Obuzor – Artistic Director