Marquette’s dance club, PURE, is incorporating color into its Nov. 18 fall showcase titled “Color Me Dance.”
Catherine McCoy, a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences, has been involved in PURE Dance since her freshman year, and has enjoyed dance since she was young.
“I started dancing when I was nine years old in fourth grade,” McCoy said. ” … I took classes for jazz, tap, lyrical and ballet … I joined the varsity dance team in high school.”
After competing through high school at the state and national levels during her sophomore and senior years, she said she knew she wanted to continue dancing in college.
For McCoy, PURE Dance was a complete change from high school competition and became a hobby where she got to meet a bunch of really great girls who also just wanted to keep up with dance in a relaxed environment. Besides being relaxed, everyone said they tend to have fun and share in the hobby.
And McCoy isn’t the only one who had the desire to continue on with dance at the collegiate level.
Kimberly Harris, a senior in the College of Health Sciences, said she also knew she wanted to pursue dance in college.
“I actually met up with one of my other PURE dancers before school even started and she knew somebody who was already in PURE and was really talking it up to me and I was interested, so I joined her at auditions,” Harris said.
Harris began her dancing career when she was seven years old with the main dances of ballet, tap and jazz and then continued into lyrical, contemporary and hip-hop. She was also part of her high school’s dance company. She has since participated in PURE for the past four years.
Harris said she is really excited for this semester’s theme, “Color Me Dance.”
“I just love all the different songs that we chose with color … some of them I just didn’t think of,” Harris said. ” … I love our opening number, which is ‘Green Light’ by Lorde.”
In this year’s showcase, each song is related to a color, and the genres of music range from jazz to contemporary to hip-hop.
“We have 10 numbers … there are fun and slow dances,” McCoy explained.
With the challenge of learning 10 numbers comes the reward of accomplishing the performance as a whole.
“Show day is really fun because we all wake up super early and practice and take pictures,” Marissa Pintozzi, a junior in the College of Nursing and PURE secretary, said.
Pintozzi began dancing when she was young and danced competitively throughout high school in contemporary and jazz. From the start of college, PURE was on Pintozzi’s mind.
“One of my sister’s friends from high school suggested it to me, so freshman year I tried out,” Pintozzi said.
Pintozzi also expressed her excitement for the performance of “Green Light” by Lorde.
“Usually our opening piece is the most upbeat and fun … usually everyone dances in that piece,” Pintozzi said.
The opening number is one of the large group dances that PURE will perform. There are also small group dances. The girls are able to pick up to five dances to partake in.
This year, the group has about 19 girls and around 10 girls choreographed the pieces to be performed.
Besides this being PURE’s showcase, a few other campus groups such as The Naturals and the Irish dance team Saoirse will perform as well.
There are two performances, one at noon and one at 4:30 a.m. Both performances are in the Weasler Auditorium and admission is free.
