Highlighting Our 12th Annual Summer Institute
Caroline Smith
Caroline Smith is a musical theater performer from Pagosa Springs Colorado from the Chemehuevi tribe. She is currently a freshman musical theater student at Fort Lewis College. She fell in love with dance from a young age, but due to some challenges financially and mental health, she had to rediscover her love for performance in high school. Some of her favorite dance styles include tap, modern, and musical theater. Her inspirations include other native dancers such as Maria Tallchief and Tommy Tune. She has worked with choreographers such as Pia Wyatt for SpongeBob the Musical at Thingamajig theater company, and Suzy DiSanto for Cabaret and Songs For a New World at Fort Lewis College. Other choreographers she has taken class from include Sarah Muirhead for tap, Allison Dean for lyrical and contemporary, Dee Pitchon for ballet, Claire Taylor for ballet, and Haily Hudson for ballet. In her free time, Caroline enjoys spending time outdoors hiking, kayaking and swimming. Her goals for the future are to spend her life doing what she loves, performing, and to give back to the community that supported her. She hopes to spend the next several years improving herself however she can to follow her passion and to become a better person.
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With Your Support
We can continue our mission to nurture the next generation of leaders in the arts through a donation to Dancing Earth. Your generosity will help us to continue offering life-changing programs like the Summer Institute and create a more equitable and sustainable world through the power of dance.
Dancing Earth self produces and collaborates with partners for:
*Dance programming for youth
*Cultivating Artist Leadership : mentoring in arts management
*Seasonal Institutes for Dancing Earth intensive movement training
*Restoring the Source Retreats Cultural Exchanges
*Creation of original Dance works, with costumes, music, video projection, visual art design and construction with sets and props
*Cinematic Movement : Dance on Film
*Choreography commissioned by schools, companies or collaborators
*Interdisciplinary gatherings and festivals
About Dancing Earth
Dancing Earth Creations dynamically activates our mission, to create contemporary dance and related arts through global indigenous and intercultural relationships centered in ecological and cultural diversity for creativity, health, and wellness.
Founded by Artistic Director Rulan Tangen, to serve a need rarely met in the USA, DEC gives hope and opportunity to Native, mixed, global Indigenous and BIPOC talent who have been largely outside the dialogue of mainstream performance because of lack of access. DEC is an organic constellation of largely self-taught dancers, composers, costumers, filmmakers, and spoken word artists.
Together, DEC artists work with community members, culture carriers, and inter-cultural elders to explore the rich diversity of ancestral heritage, contemporary identity, and relationship building, by collaborating on innovative ecologically themed performances. DEC's work promotes environmental awareness, cultural diversity, and understanding between peoples through contemporary arts expressions.
“We gather as individual artists to create experimental yet elemental dances that reflect our rich cultural heritage as contemporary global peoples. We strive to embody the unique essences of cultural perspectives by creation and renewal of artistic and cultural movement rituals. Ancient and futuristic, our dances are an elemental language of bone and blood memory in motion.” - Founding Director, Rulan Tangen