Welcome to So You Think Stern Can Dance (SYTSCD), arguably the most fun and enjoyable event of the entire Stern extracurricular calendar. Performing for two nights before a packed audience in the acoustically appropriate Norman Thomas auditorium, the show is groove-inducing for the audience and almost euphoric for the dancers on stage, who have been preparing for this night for nearly three month. In one dancer’s opinion, STYSCD is nothing less than “the epitome of Stern.”
After taking your seats, the show begins with a minute-long video clip compiled by dancer and choreographer Shoshana Seidenfeld followed by an indefatigable Bollywood number. The costumes, procured sometimes days before the show, are exquisite. The contemporary black and white.The dancers swooning. Sighing. Skating. Reaching. Bending. Approaching. Retreating. Then pause. And applause.
Yalli Cohen explains that SYTSCD offers students an opportunity unique to Stern College by enabling them to explore dance seriously in an all-female setting. “It’s a perfect forum for a talent I would otherwise not be able to express,” she says. “I don’t have an outlet to do this kind of thing anywhere else.”
Though some may be shocked to see Cohen out on stage, she is not the only surprise dancer of the night. “There are so many people you would never expect to dance,” says Helene Sonnenberg, veteran dancer and choreographer for SYTSCD, “I love how everyone’s personality comes out.”
This personality emerges prominently in the next number, a Street Hip Hop piece, that was inspired “by the different parts in all of us that we don’t show sometimes,” choreographer Whitney Kagan tells the audience. These parts in-clude black leggings straight hair pursed lips red lips Get Out Of Your Mind and every hip hop song you remember since your bat mitzvah. The dancers are dedicated to attitude. “They’re really expressing themselves,” says audience member Sarah Robinson.
The projector screen goes up then down, welcoming in a self-consciously good-natured disco-inspired retro routine featuring leg warmers (pink, green, and rainbow) and picture-ready posing.
“Old School Hip Hop”, the next dance, challenges spectators, out-gangstering them in slouchy white jeans eschewing class. They pick up their beanies as they go. “After practicing for so many hours, we’re having fun on stage, smiling at the crowd, watching them watch us,” says dancer Linor Ben Naim.
Backstage at intermission is a flurry of costumes, excitement, laughter and everywhere red lipstick. Girls congratulate each other.
“You were so good. Honestly unreal.”
“My pants were falling down.”
“You didn’t make any mistakes!”
“The video’s working out better now.”
An hour before show-time, Street Hip Hop switched formation to accommodate the absence of its choreographer, who had to leave for the hospital.
Post-intermission, the audience is treated to a moving narrative of conflict and resolution choreographed by Helene Sonnenberg, two solo performances by Lizzy Stompel and Jannah Eichenbaum exhibiting the athleticism, contortionism, and craft of artists, and a Latin piece of dueling hips in a kind of West Side Story of skirts.
Next is Broadway: an electric whirling-dervish display of continuous energy in Minnie Mouse-esque tutus and hairspray, with mouths open in wide O’s as dancers shoot their hands into the air.
“The entire process of it is fun,” says Shayna Kayla Lis, a Broadway dancer. “I came out every night [after practice] thinking it was just so much fun. It’s a culmination of months of work, and it’s so fun to be able to share the experience and to show off what we’ve been working on.”
Astonishingly, the variety of hip hop numbers continues to expand with lyrical—“Beautiful” and “Precise”—and “Urban Diva.” This last, choreographed by Shoshana Seidenfeld, is about “strong independent women strutting their stuff.” It is the final dance of the night, and the audience murmurs its anticipation. The dancers work hard for their audience: it shows on their smiling sweat-gleaming faces.
And then it is gloriously over in a final effusion of energy and pride. The dancers take to the stage for their bows, the audience rises from its seats, and dancers and spectators begin diffusing through the hall.
For Jannah Eichenbaum, who ran the program along with Arielle Braun and Dana Gerson, the biggest challenge was “creating a vision for the show and following through to make sure all aspects [came] to life.”
It was life and pride pulsing through the auditorium as dancer Natasha Bessaleli evoked the “sense of unity [the show] brings” and Seidenfeld reflected on “finding that that so many of us are skilled” and having “the opportunity to be creative in a way that we don’t always get to show.” A point of connection, “It’s time to bond with people who aren’t in your classes and aren’t the same age.”
The final product, says Sarah Robinson, was “something beautiful. [The dancers] put everything out there on the floor.” It was, in short, “amazing to see.”