The Hub Dance Collective hosted “Meet Me Again,” its first show of the semester, in the Theatre and Dance Building on Aug. 30 and 31.
Kelly Ferris Lester, co-founder of the dance collective and a dancer herself, said that the collective started as a small idea.
“We started [the Collective] in 2012. We started actually by just making a dance piece. It was just four faculty members,” Lester said. “We started it so we could just continue our artistry, and then we decided we wanted to make a full show. And then we had so much fun we decided that we wanted to keep doing this.”
The Hub Dance Collective not only includes current faculty and students in its shows, but alumni also participate.
2013 graduate of the Department of Dance Lauren Guynes said she returned to the Southern Miss campus to demonstrate her growth as a dancer.
“I’m actually performing a piece that I did my senior year here. Becca McArthur choreographed it and she reset it for the Hub Dance show,” Guynes said. “There’s a halfway new cast and I’m coming back five years later hoping to make this dance better than it was the first time around.”
Dance professor and dance collective member Brianna Jahn said that audience members will leave the show with a new view of dance.
“Every audience member comes in with their biases, and I don’t mean that in a bad way,” Jahn said. “They come in with their perspective of the world and their aesthetic and perspective of dance, and they’ll leave with a unique version, which is really great about live performance because you’ll be sitting next to someone sharing the exact same experience and it’s totally different.”
Lester said that they add unique elements to its shows that showcase the process of dance for unacquainted audience members.
“When you come into the show, we have live musicians. You will see us in the space warming up so that the audience knows that we just don’t appear and suddenly we can do all these things,” Lester said. “There’s a process to it. The dances are all different, so you are going to have dances to jazz music, some to piano and some to even choral music.”
For more information on scheduled performances, visit the Department of dance webpage on the USM website.
