Mesa State’s dance program has taken one more step in the right direction.
Dancers from Mesa State College, accompanied by Assistant Professor of Dance Matthew Lindstrom, attended the North Western Region’s American College Dance Festival (ACDF). The purpose of ACDF is for colleges and universities to gather, take dance technique classes, and show their choreographic works.
Weber State University in Ogden, Utah hosted the North Western ACDF this year, while the University of Colorado Boulder, University of New Mexico, University of Oregon, and University of California West Bay were among the 20 institutions in attendance.
The festival was held for three days with registration starting on Wednesday evening and classes starting the next morning. During the day, portions of the students take classes, and at night they perform and watch other students perform. Kaleigh Guesman, a junior dance major, and Stephanie Hesse, a junior dance and acting/directing major, were two of the students representing Mesa State at the conference. Guesman, Hesse and 18 other Mesa students were able to take classes with 400 student dancers from other schools.
“I think it’s exciting to get to talk to people who feel passionately about what it is that we’re doing,” Guesman said. “It’s refreshing to be surrounded by people who feel as strongly as you do about dance and performing.”
Each school is also allowed to bring two pieces to be shown in the performances, and the pieces are then judged by an adjudication board made up of dance professionals. This year the panel consisted of Adam Sklute, the artistic director for Ballet West, Ze’eva Cohen, the founder of the dance program at Princeton University, and Helanius J. Wilkins, founder and artistic Director of EDGEWORKS Dance Theater.
Mesa State performed both of its pieces Friday night. One piece was choreographed by junior dance major Alexis Evans and was titled, “If I Should Be So Bold,” and the second piece was choreographed by Lindstrom and was titled “If I Were Then You’d be(e).” Both pieces were received well by the adjudicators, but “If IProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

ere Then You’d Be(e)” made the biggest impression on the audience.
“I have very few things written because I was laughing so much,” Sklute said in the adjudication feedback session. “I was engaged from start to finish.”
The piece involved dancers dressed as flowers with large colorful pedals dangling around their necks, and other dancers were dressed in bee suits, wings and antennas included. Each bee and her flower partner frolic along in a park until the one lone bee with a flower falls in love with a man sitting on a bench.
“Really a delightful, delightful, delightful piece,” Cohen said.
The dProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

cers jovially ran around the stage sniffing flowers and hopping, skipping, and rolling on the floor throughout the entire dance as if it were something straight from Cartoon Network.
“In simplicity, there is genius,” Wilkins said.
The piece definitely entertained the entire audience that night, and Mesa was given the opportunity to do so again. Out of all of the schools’ pieces, only 10 were chosen to perform at the Saturday night Gala, and Mesa was selected to close the show. This was the first time MSC has been chosen to perform in the ACDF Gala but certainly not the last.
“We’re a small school but we have a wide range of talent. It proves that the department has grown immensely in the last few years,” Hesse said.
“It was a huge honor to be able to perform at the Gala. For me, it was the next step because it was such a big and beautiful theater,” Guesman said. “It gave me a sense of professionalism; it was one of the best feelings in the world.”
Mesa State dancers will continue their excellence in dance at their next event, the spring dance concert on April 23 and 24.

Mesa State Dancers preparing themselves for an upcoming performance on Friday. Tiffany Freeman/Criterion