The Dance Club’s semi-annual FanatiX dance show took place in the Sierra Nevada building on Oct. 14 with well over 100 audience members which consisted of current students, alumni, faculty, friends and family.

The event is open each semester for students who audition full pieces the week before the performance date in order to make the set list. Dancers work hard, but it has to mean something to them, say the organizers. “If it matters to you, you’ll get it done,” said Victor Robles, director of the newly formed Glendale College Dance Company (GCDC), which was founded in the spring of 2017.

In the week between auditions and the performance, the Dance Club and the GCDC worked together to produce this show with a few select pieces contributed by professors and one piece choreographed by the company.

Ani Vitani, GCDC member and dance club officer, said “the company is a space to grow as dancers.” Plus, being part of the club provides members with good exercise and a release, say the members. That release is emotional, physical, and mental.

In the second half of the show, Robles’ choreography tells the story of a girl’s coming of age. How our idea of touch and the way we experience it changes and evolves, demonstrated through the dance. “The music,” said Robles, “evoked the idea of a past culture where genders were segregated.”

The song, “The Rite Of Spring” by Igor Stravinsky, is complex and challenging, a risk because “the music is crazy to count, rhythms are diverse and syncopation is placed in unexpected areas.”

Robles considers the experience of music to be an educational one. “[It] is our job as educators to introduce our students to work that is historical and will change them,” he said.

This fall marks the passing of the baton. Starting spring 2018, Robles will be taking over as head of dance productions.

GCC will celebrate Dora Krannig’s “Swan Song” with the faculty and alumni show “Sacred Earth, Sacred Dance” in early December. “We are a very small little place in the very vast universe, lets get out of the narcissi and make dance universal,” said Krannig in her farewell video. “Every feeling we have as humans should be reflected in everybody else. So let’s be one people, one earth, one dance.”