{"id":152066,"date":"2023-03-09T13:03:36","date_gmt":"2023-03-09T18:03:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=152066"},"modified":"2026-05-22T11:12:25","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T15:12:25","slug":"peek-behind-the-curtain-ep-5-places-people-places","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2023\/03\/09\/peek-behind-the-curtain-ep-5-places-people-places\/","title":{"rendered":"Peek Behind the Curtain (Ep. 5): Places, people, places!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On the Schaeffer Theater stage, a group of students are warming up, rhythmically stepping and swinging together to \u201cSOS\u201d by Rihanna. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They\u2019re the cast of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ theater production of Shakespeare\u2019s Much Ado About Nothing \u2014 <\/em>which opens March 16<\/a> \u2014 <\/em>and they\u2019re learning the East Coast Swing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Mia
Sydney Childs ’24 of Cohasset, Mass., swings away from Dhruv Chandra ’25 of Kolkata, India, as they perform one of the East Coast Swing’s signatures moves: the swing out. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Rihanna might seem an unusual song for a dance whose heyday was during the mid-1900s big band era. And swing dancing is surely an odd addition to a Shakespeare play. But the dance fits just right for this production, set when swing was still king, right after World War II, on a coastal estate on Maine\u2019s Mount Desert Island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The actors, wearing bejeweled and be-feathered masks, will debut their swing skills during the play\u2019s masked ball scene; Rihanna will be replaced by Glenn Miller and his big-band classic, \u201cIn The Mood,\u201d played by a small band on the Schaeffer stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the advantages of East Coast Swing, which has a six-count basic step, is that you can dance it to pretty much anything, Rihanna included, says Mia Bernstein \u201923, a double major in dance and anthropology from Bedford, Mass., who is teaching the cast swing, with help from Peter Nguyen \u201924, a physics major from Philadelphia, and Lauren Reed \u201923, a dance and Africana major from Baton Rouge, La.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Mia
Mia Bernstein ’23 of Bedford, Mass., directs the cast during a dance rehearsal. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When Tim Dugan, an assistant professor of theater and the director of the play, asked Bernstein if she could teach swing to the cast, she knew she had to get Nguyen, a fellow member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Ballroom Team, on board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf I’m teaching, I need a partner because I can’t do both sides of the footwork at the same time,\u201d Bernstein explains. \u201cI know all the follower steps, but I don’t know what his feet are doing half the time. I just know what his arms are telling me to do. And so we kind of work together to make sure that nobody’s tripping over their own feet and getting bad directions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s more than smooth footwork: After digging into the history of East Coast Swing, which evolved from the Lindy Hop, born in the Black neighborhoods of Harlem, Bernstein knew that \u201cthere was no way we can do this without acknowledging and working with the roots of the dance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Reed\u2019s help, Bernstein has been performing a sort of \u201creverse archeology\u201d of the dance, poring over old dance manuals, videos of performers, and history texts, to \u201cput the Black and jazz aesthetics back into this dance and attribute it to the people who created it and who it really belongs to,\u201d says Bernstein.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Mia
In the center, Maggie Nespole ’23 of Annapolis, Md., and Danny Liu ’24 of Beaver Dam, Wis., let their feet fly as they practice. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One major change, says Bernstein, is the posture. European-style ballroom dance \u2014 and especially competitive ballroom dance \u2014 features a more rigid, straight-backed posture, similar to that of ballet. The original posture, with its jazz roots, had a lower center of gravity, and was more loose and fluid. This is what they\u2019re teaching the Much Ado<\/em> cast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it\u2019s obvious from watching the cast rehearse that they are having fun figuring out how their characters dance the East Coast Swing. Most are wearing their costume shoes, and the clowns of the cast \u2014 Dogberry, Verges, and the Watch \u2014 are bringing their inner clowns<\/a> to the choreography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Out in the house, facing the stage, Lucie Green \u201923 is typing speedily on her laptop, jotting down notes on everything happening onstage. She\u2019s a theater and English major from Pittsburgh, and this production is in partial fulfillment of her theater thesis in stage management. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s also the first Shakespeare credit on her resume. She\u2019s been prepping for the show since last summer, studying the text and gathering an endless list of every entrance, exit, stage cue, scripted prop, setting, and character description<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think that the stage manager really just has to have a working knowledge of every aspect of the production to be able to do it successfully,\u201d Green says. She has a maze of folders of documents and spreadsheets living on her computer, full of notes on the text, schedules, to-do lists and deadlines, notes from every rehearsal, and much, much more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Mia
Lucie Green ’23 of Pittsburgh watches the rehearsal intently, since the notes she takes are an integral part of developing the show. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For part of her thesis, she\u2019s writing a handbook in stage management that she hopes will be useful to future students interested in stage management. It\u2019s based on her own subjective experience, she says, but has tips on creating a good theater environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor the environment to be healthy and fulfilling and sustainable, that’s really the most important thing to me,\u201d Green says. \u201cBecause that’s the only way that people are going to enjoy it and that’s more important than the little mechanics that I’m working on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As everyone involved in the production heads into the final week of rehearsals and adjustments, the actors really start to hone in on their characters, Dugan says, and their collaboration with the stage manager and technical team really starts to blossom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Mia
Mia Bernstein \u201923 of Bedford, Mass., compares rehearsal notes with Assistant Professor of Theater and director Tim Dugan, as the band practices behind them. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A lot can change in a week, \u201cand that’s kind of the wonderful thing about the play process, is that it starts gradually becoming the actors’ journey,\u201d he says. \u201cThere’s a real feeling of giving it over because they’re the ones who are going to be doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The cast of \u201cMuch Ado About Nothing\u201d is dancing into their final week of rehearsals \u2014 and it\u2019s the East Coast Swing! Get a glimpse of the rehearsals and an insider\u2019s view into the role of a stage manager in this final \u201cPeek Behind the Curtain\u201d before opening night on March 16.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":152236,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"bates_author_byline_override":"Freddie Wright","_estimated-read-time":"","_post-template":"\/usr\/local\/webserver\/webpve\/htdocs\/new-www.bates.edu\/wp-content\/themes\/b\/news\/single-big-header-image.php","_header-color":"#000000","_photo-credit":"Phyllis Graber Jensen","_header-effect":"parallax","override_related_with_tag":"","_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"The production is set when swing was still king on a Maine island coastal estate.","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[11010,14,11012],"tags":[12313],"class_list":["post-152066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-faculty-staff","category-student-life","tag-peek-behind-the-curtain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152066"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152309,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152066\/revisions\/152309"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}