Dance Performance & Choreography Major
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About the Major
The dance performance and choreography program features a unique and intensive course of study designed to give students the knowledge, experience and professional exposure needed to build a successful career as a dancer, choreographer or graduate student. Dance students focus on technical training, creative exploration, choreographic skills, body-mind centering knowledge and collaborative dance-making.
Jobs in Dance Performance & Choreography
- Dancer
- Choreographer
- Dance teacher
- Artistic director
- Arts administrator
Past Elon Dance Performance & Choreography Internships
- Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
- Boston Ballet
- American Dance Festival
- Diavolo dance company
- Alonzo King LINES Ballet
Related Majors
Elon program opened dancer’s mind to endless possibilities — and she’s built an eclectic career on them
When Rachel Linsky arrived at Elon University in 2015, ready to declare a major in dance performance and choreography, she assumed her career path would lead to one day opening a dance studio and teaching. It was the only thing she imagined a person could do with such a degree.
Elon showed her there was so much more.
“I think going in, I didn’t even have a sense of the possibilities of what you could do with a career in dance, and Elon certainly helped to expand that for me, to show me the possibilities, cultivate a dream that was more authentic to what I wanted to do, and then help me develop the skills to go after that,” Linsky said.
After graduating from Elon in 2019 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance performance and choreography and a Bachelor of Arts in arts administration, Linsky took the skills she developed and, piece by piece, created an eclectic career in Boston that includes dancing professionally and researching, choreographing and directing her own works.
I think going in, I didn’t even have a sense of the possibilities of what you could do with a career in dance, and Elon certainly helped to expand that for me.
“It started from just a huge conglomeration of doing so many different things and over time being able to narrow down to what aligns and fulfills me most,” she said.
Linsky chose Elon for its rigorous dance program, which would give her conservatory-style training within the context of a liberal arts school. At Elon, she could also get a double major, which was important to her; if she was going to one day run her own studio, she knew she needed administrative experience. And while she hasn’t ended up working within the realm of arts administration, her second major proved to be immensely helpful in the career she’s built.
“You can’t launch a choreographic career, you can’t create, produce, or pitch your own work, without those skills,” she said. “Even as a performer or as a teacher, you always need those skills to be able to market yourself and be able to communicate, network and talk about your work in that way.”
While at Elon, Linsky took advantage of the many hands-on opportunities the university offers: internships, research, dance performances and the ability to get choreographic experience. Each in its own way, she said, contributed to the career she has today.
She held multiple internships over her four years, including a 40-hour-a-week summer internship with Urbanity Dance in Boston in its community outreach and education program.
“It was the best opportunity to learn from being immersed in it,” she said. “It was probably the best way to really get a sense of what it would be like to work for an organization in this capacity and really learn the ins and out of the organization.”
The connections she made at her internships led to work after graduation; for the first few years out of college, she taught at Urbanity. And another internship — with Peter DiMuro/Public Displays of Motion — led to her first professional dance job.
Linsky also took part in research at Elon during her junior and senior years. Under the direction of her mentor, Associate Professor Jen Guy Metcalf, the two developed Pilates sequences and exercise plans that were cultivated around specific dance technique goals Linsky had. Then they experimented; they’d determine, for example, if they saw improvement after performing one exercise four days a week over the course of a semester.
“At the time, I was like, ‘Is this not just the coolest thing to get credit for? To get to develop a Pilates plan toward my dance goals? But it’s been pretty influential for my approach to teaching now,” she said. “I don’t think going into school I could have had an understanding of what research within dance meant.”
Research also played a role in the opportunity she was given during her senior year to choreograph the play “Trojan Barbie” for Elon’s acting program. It was her first time choreographing a play and working with a large creative team, and through the experience, she was introduced to the world of dramaturgy — the technique of researching and interpreting scripts to provide the cast and crew with vital information about their roles — and how it works in the context of theater and dance.
“It was a very new experience getting to work with actors and thinking even more about dance as a storytelling medium,” she said.
What turned out to be one of the most influential experiences to her career also occurred during her senior year at Elon. For Hillel’s Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) services, she developed a dance piece called “Do I Want to Remember?” She wanted to create something that would be of interest to her non-Jewish friends at Elon who didn’t know as much about the Holocaust. It was just a five-minute piece, but it inspired her to further develop the concept.
“It gave me a solid base to begin applying for things — festivals, grants, residencies,” she said. “You just need a seed, and that’s allowed a much larger choreographic career to emerge and develop from that.”
That seed led to Zachor — Linsky’s ongoing series of works that seeks to preserve Holocaust survivor testimony through dance.
Over the past five years since graduating from Elon, she has been commissioned to create and present work throughout Boston, including at the New England Conservatory and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has presented dance films in national and international festivals and been an artist in residence, a fellow and a cohort member for multiple arts organizations. She’s been dancing with Kairos, a contemporary dance theater company in Boston, since 2019. And while she doesn’t teach as much as she did when she first got out of college, she still holds dance workshops, including those in contemporary, ballet and Yiddish folk dance. Over the past two years, she’s also been doing creative research in collaboration with klezmer musicians to develop movement language and new works fusing elements of Yiddish folk dance with her contemporary practice.
Linsky said she’s most proud of the community she’s been able to cultivate — the group of dancers she works with in choreography collaborations, performances and education programs. She said she doesn’t have an interest in working as a solo artist — it’s about the people, the collaborative energy and being able to bring different voices into a room. It’s certainly more than she ever imagined was possible in a career.
“My time studying dance at Elon opened my mind to the different possibilities of what you could do with dance,” she said. “I could not in a million years have imagined that it was even an option to end up doing what I’m doing now.”
Did You Know?
- Students must audition for the dance program — but once they’re in, they don’t have to wait in line to perform. Beginning in their first semester, they participate in the program’s site-specific dance concert, which takes place during Family Weekend each fall. Throughout the year, there are opportunities for stage productions, student choreography showings and networking with professional guest artists.
- Students are immersed in the creative dance process through three levels of composition courses. They complete courses in West African dance, dance history, somatic theories, ballet, contemporary modern dance, dance ensemble, professional practices and a Senior Seminar. The many elective dance courses include tap, jazz, pointe, Pilates, hip-hop, yoga, dance pedagogy, repertory, dance for the camera and more.
- Students receive expert guidance in preparing professional résumés, portfolios, reels and other materials to apply to graduate school or secure a job. Recent graduates are employed by companies in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Orlando, Chicago, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Florence, Italy.