“Portals Showcase,” a production featuring visual art, dances and other artistic disciplines by students, is coming to the Barbara Barker Center for Dance from Friday through Sunday.
The showcase will feature a wide range of art, including theatrical productions, poetry, music and paintings, according to Nakeema Ray, a second-year student who assists with grants and programming for the event. “Portals” is produced by BFA dance students in the “Dance Production” class, a year-long course that teaches students how to put together an art show from start to finish, and will feature 15 student artists.
The Friday and Saturday shows will start at 7 p.m. and the Sunday show will start at 5 p.m.
The team producing “Portals” wants to provide a space for student artists to showcase their work and foster community.
“The main value of ours was to bring more access to art,” Ray said.
One of the artists, Rebecca Wickert, is a fourth-year student studying theatre arts and fashion studies. She’s been involved in theater her entire life but switched to producing and directing shows when she started college.
Some of Wickert’s work includes assistant theater directing at the University, directing class projects and producing a play featured at the Minnesota Fringe Festival last summer.
An avid fan of horror films, Wickert wishes she could see more of the genre in live theater. She said a majority of her artistic exploration at the University has been how to make horror work onstage. Her first horror project was an adaptation of the 1973 horror touchstone “The Exorcist.”
Wickert’s project for “Portals” is a stage adaptation of three scenes from the 2018 remake of “Suspiria,” a horror classic about a secretive dance academy. According to Wickert, her immediate thought after seeing the movie for the first time was how well it could be adapted into a play.
Adapting a movie into a play requires a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach. The choreographer of the production and the lighting designer for “Portals” worked closely with Wickert to execute the vision.
“What I’ve learned along the way through the process is that in creating horror on stage, it’s all of these elements,” Wickert said. “It’s the acting and the movement but it’s also the lights and the sound.”
Two other artists, Ella Kooyer and Vy Nguyen, are performing a dance duet at the showcase and said dancing is crucial to the way they tell their stories.
Nguyen, a third-year student studying dance and journalism, started dancing because verbal communication can be limiting for her.
“As a child, being bilingual and having broken English and broken Vietnamese, like in my language, it was just a lot easier for me to communicate and make friends through movement and dance,” Nguyen said.
Kooyer, a third-year student studying dance and French, said she loves dance because the human body can tell many different stories.
The artists met during their freshman year and learned they made a good dance team. They both wanted another chance to collaborate and decided to choreograph a piece for the showcase together.
Kooyer said their dance piece explores themes of childhood, sisterhood and the need for gentleness and being taken care of.
“We all kind of need that sort of motherliness right now and we’re yearning for something a little bit gentler,” Kooyer said.
The piece will be performed during a poetry reading from Decha Ann, another “Portals” artist, according to Nguyen. At first, the dancers didn’t plan on collaborating with Ann, but they discovered their themes worked well together after meeting.
Nguyen said she appreciates when intersections are found among different art media.
“To have a show with so many different creators, like dancers and a spoken poet, a composer, there’s so much room for us to mix and match and create new ideas,” Nguyen said.
Tickets for the showcase are available online or in person for $8.
