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By Julie Rausch

Dance students rehearse the piece "Falling Between the Lines," choreographed by Nick Johnson, for the upcoming Kansas Dance Festival.

Dance is hot at WSU, and if dance faculty and students have their way, their art form is going to bubble over into the community.

There’s a lot to be excited about. The dance department credit hours are up 38 percent from four years ago. When Nick Johnson, director of dance, began at WSU in 1997, there were 12 dance majors in the department. Now there are 23.

"All I’ve ever really wanted to do here was get us on the map. Ideally, I’d love to have us be the hub for dance in the Midwest," says Johnson.

"And the reason we might be able to pull something like that off is that we’re a metropolitan university. In the city there’s growing opportunities for recognition culturally, then there’s the corporate background which even though I wouldn’t say they are wholly supportive of the arts, they are primed to be if we can continue to show our value. If we continue to be on top of what we are doing, providing the best possible performances for the community and for our dance students, I think people are going to eventually notice."

There’s been a liberal dose of prominent dance companies scheduled in WSU’s Connoisseur Series, the past two years, including Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and the Trinity, Doug Varone, Ririe-Woodbury and Seán Curran dance companies.

"I think the WSU fine arts series is making an art form visible to a town that had no concept of it except to a small minority of people who happen to like dance and go to the one show that came in a year."

Students also see major benefits when guest artists visit. For example, when Varone was at WSU last season, Johnson asked him if he would create a piece for WSU students for this year’s Kansas Dance Festival. The students will perform "Bench Quartet" during the Nov. 19-20 festival.

Another dancer/choreographer, Curran, who performed at WSU Oct. 30, has agreed to create a dance for next year, Johnson says.

"We are determined to bring in a strong guest artist series to expose students to choreographers. It’s great education, great networking and great stylistically to work with various choreographers.

"The whole idea as a dancer is that you’re an instrument," says Johnson. "Someone composes music and you play it. You want to be versatile, diverse and individual. I try to bring in choreographers who bring out the individuality of the dancers. I’m interested in the power of each individual and so are these choreographers."

In "Falling Between the Lines," a modern piece Johnson has created for KDF, the themes are anger, life’s struggles, self-preservation, mellowing with time, overcoming fears and supportiveness among friends and family. Johnson says a choreographer has to take something that he feels internally and figure out how to say that in an abstract sense using movement.

"It has a lot of meaning for me, because I’m a mime and a dancer," says Johnson. "I’m crazy about the use of gesture. I’m fascinated about setting the use of pneumatic techniques I’ve learned into a dance framework."

Another faculty member, Terri McWilliams, is creating an original work for the KDF. Her piece, she says, deals with the struggle of humanity in connection with the human processes of give and take, stability and instability and the cyclical ebb and flow of life’s rhythms.

"For me the movement speaks for itself in a nonverbal manner, so I don’t care to guide the viewers experience by telling what I am trying to communicate," says McWilliams. "I like the audience to approach the work free of any associations and experience the movement and rhythms individually."

In addition to the upcoming KDF, which will feature the works from seven universities, WSU will host the American College Dance Festival in March, involving 30-40 colleges. About 400 dancers will take master classes in every available room at the Heskett Center.

"It’s a huge experience for college dancers," Johnson says. "It’s a chance for them to network, talk about programs and share war stories."