The Sproul Studio
Days in the life of a Berkeley choreographer
Saturday, September 10th
I roll up the sleeves of my Danceworx Officer Board shirt on the crisp morning and look at the crowd developing on the steps of Upper Sproul Plaza, thinking of all the homework that I still won’t be able to work on for another five hours.
It doesn’t matter that I lost most of last weekend to our Officer Board Retreat or most of Thursday evening to learning and teaching the choreography for auditions today. Those were to be expected the moment I applied for another semester as a Danceworx choreographer. Between today’s auditions and Tuesday night’s make-up auditions and choreographer deliberations, I can expect to start the semester behind on my English readings. It’s not exactly anything new. And it’s not new to the hundreds of dancers in line, many of whom have already lost hours upon hours to auditions for The [M]ovement, AFX, TruElement, and Main Stacks Dance Team. This is just another Berkeley Dance Community audition, and this is just another semester where jazz, tap, and hip hop dancers will be forced to leap, turn, twist and roll in tennis shoes on the concrete and brick ground.
We coordinated these auditions in early July, fighting over weekends and hours with Thrive Dance Company, Abba Modern, and Crossroads Dance. It’s a necessary but tedious affair for all thirty-something of the campus dance groups that make up the Berkeley Dance Community to coordinate with each other. The organizations’ presidents, chairs, and directors work with the Dance Board — run out of the office of BDC’s very own ASUC Senator — to coordinate everything from audition times to showcase dates to practice space reservations. With well over eight hundred students in the collective student dance community, it’s a necessary step to take.
During the hip hop audition, a homeless man begins screaming and spitting homophobic slurs at the choreographers. Our Outreach Chair has to call the campus police department before we can continue teaching.
Thursday, October 13th
For me, it’s another Thursday evening spent rolling on the concrete ground of Lower Sproul.
On the other wall of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union, a seventy-person AFX training team is piecing together their set, and the first-time dancers who joined this non-cut club work their hardest to string together moves that may feel foreign to their still-learning bodies. Across the quad on the steps of Zellerbach Hall, one of the campus’s three competitive hip hop troupes is just starting their twice-a-week warm-up.
In our corner in front of the Cal-1 Card Office, my hip hop choreographer is trying to teach us a few breakdancing moves to see who in our set can pull them off. We perform the section for him full out in small groups while he takes video so he can block us in formations for when we perform the set at our showcase in December.
While I wait for my group to dance for the camera, I can’t help but look over at the students doing their best to ignore us from the tables in the Student Union on the other side of the wide glass windows.
As I get up, I brush the dust off of my leggings and stare at my aching hands. The cobbled texturing of the ground below us has left indentations on my palms. Surely whoever had designed this brand-new Student Union complex hadn’t accounted for dozens of dance teams interrupting the intended quiet of this new study space. The glass provides us a constant audience, whether we like it or not and whether they want to enjoy the show or not. The addition of two dance studios in the newly constructed Eshleman Hall is not enough to counteract the two hundred more students who have joined one of AFX’s non-cut training teams in the past two years. We have a community growing faster than the space it breathes in, a demand growing faster than supply seems like it can ever accommodate.
Sunday, November 20th
A hundred-ish of us huddle under the overhang on the Upper Sproul side of MLK, unsure of what to do as we stare apprehensively at the rain beating down on the plaza.
The discussion at our officer board meeting the morning before had left concerns of a rain soaked Sproul Dress Rehearsal at a simple “we’ll play it by ear,” despite a weather report that had been promising a weekend of storms for days now. The rain is coming down now harder than it did an hour ago, and dancers look towards the Danceworx co-Presidents and Outdoor Showcase Coordinator apprehensively from underneath layers of full performance makeup. After all, Singin’ in the Rain makes dancing through downpours look like way more fun than it actually is.
We know we’re caught between a rock and a hard place, though. This is the last weekend before Thanksgiving Break, and there is no other day to which we can postpone this. We need to prepare for our Sproul Shows, when we spend two days in a row embarrassing ourselves at lunchtime on the steps of the main plaza of campus.
Eventually, we trudge down to the parking garage underneath Zellerbach and Eshleman Halls. With the echoing of the concrete around us and while dodging cars driving through and weird-looking puddles of automotive fluid, we run through our show. We wear Converse in place of tap shoes and pretend that rolling around in a parking garage is totally normal. Once we’ve finished performing and taking pictures, we make our way back outside to run formations on our “stage.” The weather has lightened considerably, but we still do our best to hide underneath umbrellas and raincoats as we block out our spacing.
When I head home for Thanksgiving Break a few days later, I wonder why I’m starting to get sick.
Friday, December 2nd
I’m running from an extra class meeting to tabling on Upper Sproul to lunch to class when one of my dancers texts me that her mom is in the hospital and she can’t perform in our show anymore.
It’s something I can understand, of course. It’s just not something I have time to properly deal with this close to curtain.
As I sit at the table to advertise ticket sales for tonight’s Danceworx Indoor Showcase at the on-campus venue we’ve spent way too much money to book, I frantically redo formations on my phone, schedule an extra tech rehearsal slot with the Indoor Showcase Coordinators, and notify my dancers about the changes. That’s all I can do for now — I’ll worry about the rest later. For now I finish class, run home to do my hair and makeup, and run back to campus for an extra rehearsal in the sharp December air outside Zellerbach Playhouse, between Lower Sproul and Haas Pavilion. Even with the temperature outside, we still find ourselves stripping our sweatshirts off, too hot from our constant movement despite the bite of the air on our skin.
An audience develops as people slowly trickle out of an event in Zellerbach Hall. They stop and watch us curiously as they head back to their cars, and we try to pretend like they’re not there as we spend our Friday afternoon quite inappropriately shaking what our mamas hath given to us and dropping to the floor in an outdoor campus walkway.
I rush through the workshop comments due that afternoon in my short story class and still haven’t done the readings due five days before, but hey, the show goes great.
Monday, December 5th
It’s oddly quiet at Lower Sproul tonight.
Showcases are done. Rehearsals have finished. There are no more performances this semester to prepare for. The open spaces in front of Zellerbach Hall and the Cal-1 Card Office are pristine and clear, and the students inside MLK can catch up on their reading without sixty dancers waving in their faces.
It looks more lonely and empty to me than anything else.
Despite the cold nights outside and the aching knees, these grounds feel like they belong under our feet. They belong to a community too full of life and movement to be confined to the spaces set out for us. They belong to those who practice in studios on weekend mornings and group workout classrooms in the campus gyms late at night, who meet in the depths of parking garages and in the open spaces of Lower Sproul Plaza. They belong to those who learn not in classrooms but in open spaces, and not about cell structure or the intricacies of Chaucer’s writings or coding in Python but about movement and their bodies in space. Those who pretend their head colds aren’t from late night practices in November and who will have time for books later — after rehearsal.
Those with schoolwork to do can have the space for now. But come January, we’ll be back in our studio.
