New York City has more to offer than an iconic skyline; it is said to be a place filled with opportunity, inspiration and lots of traffic. 49 students who are currently enrolled in dance, theatre and chorus were given the opportunity to take a four-day trip into the big city over Spring Break, beginning March 25. The group went to Manhattan and stayed in a hotel right next to Times Square. It was a memorable experience for many.
“My favorite thing about the trip was seeing the musical Something Rotten! and getting to walk around and explore the city,” junior Ashby Volk said. “I had no idea what to expect when I was going there, and it was a lot of fun.”
While visiting the City That Never Sleeps, the students took dance classes of their choosing and watched dance performances and musicals.
Junior Jamie Gingerich compared the dance classes she took in New York to the classes at Northwood.
“In the classes, we did a lot of the same things that we do in regular dance class,” Gingerich said. “We did warm ups and learned combinations, but it was a lot more fast-paced, because they are real professionals.”
The dance department has been going on this trip since the early 2000s. While the dance classes used to be the only group that traveled to New York, this year some new classes were incorporated into the trip.
“This year was the first year that dance, theatre and chorus all went together,” dance teacher Kristen Oakes said. “Usually, it is just all dance, so that was something that was new this year for the trip.”
Aside from taking dance classes and attending performances, the students were able to explore the vastness of the city.
“We went to the 9/11 memorial, toured NBC studios [and] walked around Chinatown, Little Italy and Soho,” Volk said. “The city is definitely a place to go if you want to make something for yourself. I met somebody in a glasses hut, and she was talking to me about how she moved to the city alone just to try to make a name for herself.”
After experiencing a visit to the Big Apple for the first time, students’ eyes were opened to how important dance is to Broadway dancers and how these professionals are normal people just like everyone else.
“A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, New York is too big’ or ‘I could never make it on Broadway,’ but when you go, [you] see that they’re actually real people,” Oakes said. “We saw An American in Paris, and the lead female came out and was signing the playbills at the end, and when she finished signing, she just walked down the street. It’s like all of a sudden, we just watched you do a phenomenal performance, and then you just walk down the street and nobody knew that she was just a regular person again, so I think that was really cool for [the students] to see.”
– By Briana Stone
