Showcase and Laboratory: With its faculty choreographers and their student dancers, The Current celebrates a curriculum at work

The Current offers the perfect enticement for lay lovers of dance who are hungry for a taste of… well, everything. 

This year’s robust program of works by faculty members in CU’s Department of Theatre and Dance, as well as a contribution by visiting artist Tiffany Bong runs April 24 through 27. The program will span “ballet to Hip Hop/Street Styles to contemporary to performance art,” promises choreographer and showcase producer, Helanius J. Wilkins, no stranger to interconnections. Wilkins’ own thoughtfully connective piece “The Conversation Series: Stitching the Geopolitical Quilt to Re-Body Belonging,” was performed at Roe Green Theatre last fall. And the associate professor of dance is working on a piece with students for The Current. 

Other faculty choreographers include Michelle Ellsworth, Larry Southall, Anya Cloud, Laura Malpass and Erika Randall.

A Los Angeles-based choreographer-dancer, Tiffany Bong has spent more than a decade introducing hip-hop dance—its ethos, its pop and lock and waack—to fresh audiences. “[She’s] a B girl, which is really exciting because more times than not in the past, when we’ve had Hip Hop-based artists, they’ve been male-identifying artists,” Wilkins says. “So, to have a female-identifying artist is pretty exciting.” The James and Rebecca Roser visiting artist will spend two weeks working with students on a new piece set to premiere during The Current.  

“One of the things that makes us unique as a dance program is that our greater season is student-centric,” says Wilkins. In an elegant sense, The Current embodies the department’s fertile, student-centric pedagogy. “It’s “our curriculum at work,” as Wilkins puts it. Most of the dancers in the showcase are students. There’s beauty in process. The shaping of each year’s performance connects students to their teachers as artists and experimenters, as creators who soar but who also must be willing to stumble. 

“I feel it’s important that students see their instructors, their professors as human beings,” Wilkins says. “You see us fail, you see us struggle, you see us have great success, you see what it takes for us to figure out what we’re doing.”

If that makes The Current sound like a laboratory, well yes. “We learn to do what we do through practice, through trial and error, through testing ideas, through working collectively together,” says Wilkins. “What the Current affords us is an opportunity to be in practice together and to figure it out together.”   

But it’s also a bridge between the inner workings of choreography and an audience. I think that is one of the most important things for our students to experience.”  

CU Dance will present “The Current” at the Charlotte York Irey Theatre from April 24 through 27, 2025.