The WVU School of Theatre and Dance presents its flagship dance production, “Dance Now!” Feb. 5-7 at the Canady Creative Arts Center Lyell B. Clay Concert Theatre. Under the artistic direction of WVU Dance Director Yoav Kaddar, the program will feature performances and choreography by students, faculty and guest artists and companies.
Each year, WVU Dance students choreograph pieces for “Celebration of Dance” in the fall with the hopes of being selected for “Dance Now!” The 2026 production of “Dance Now!” will feature choreography from seven students: Isabella Runion, Sarah Woolley, Lauren Riggenbach, Isabel Al-Zoubi, Abby Cox, Sophie Burkey and Makayla Miller.
Runion, Woolley and Riggenbach shared their process and journey from “Celebration of Dance” to “Dance Now!”
Isabella Runion is a senior double-majoring in Dance and Health and Well-being. She choreographed a contemporary modern piece to “Ever Since New York” by Harry Styles called “Through and Back Again.” Although Runion has been trained in ballet, tap, jazz, lyrical and acrobatic tap, she favors modern and contemporary. She has choreographed pieces for “Celebration of Dance” twice, but this is the first time her work has been selected for “Dance Now!”
Sarah Woolley is a senior Dance major with a History minor and a member of the hip-hop dance team. Though Woolley feels most at home in hip hop, she choreographed a jazzier piece to Beyonce’s “Yaya” called “Clever Girls.” She choreographed for the first time in spring 2025, and this is her first time having a piece chosen for “Dance Now!”
Lauren Riggenbach is a junior studying Dance and Marketing. Her piece is called “Echoes of the Rose,” choreographed to the French song “Corps” (“Corpse” in English) by Yseult. She’s trained in a variety of dance styles, but she’s most comfortable with hip-hop or dynamic jazz pieces because of their sharp, structured movements. She has choreographing experience, but fall 2025 was the first time she choreographed a piece for “Celebration of Dance.”
Q: Can you talk about the dance you choreographed?
Runion: I remember listening to “Ever Since New York” by Harry Styles, listening to the drums and the guitar, and I could just envision the dance: the formations, the transitions, how many people I want on stage, the movement quality that I want. I actually started choreographing this piece during the summer when I was a counselor for the WVU Teen Dance Academy.
I based this piece off the concept of a repeating cycle that you go through over and over. In the past few years, I’ve had a lot of change in my life, specifically unexpected deaths in my family. I grew up going to private school, and the transition from private school to public school was pretty intense.
All of it was happening around the same time, and it felt like I was in an endless loop. But at the end of it, I felt like I was much closer to my family. I made incredible friends who helped me through that process. This piece was a release of those big feelings I had been having for so long.
Riggenbach : I wanted to do this idea in the spring, but I didn't have enough time to execute it. So it really came together in the summer, and when we came back to campus in the fall, I had everything laid out.
Basically, the piece is about grief and how that looks on different people. Each of the seven dancers represents someone different: a different journey, a different type of grief. It can be loss of a friend, a relationship, a dream. I told them to find something within their personal lives and present it.
Throughout the dance, it's a relationship between them and the red flower they hold, which represents the life after grief that they aren’t ready for and people trying to give them reasons to move on.
A white flower is thrown on stage at the end to represent the key you use to open that door to life after grief. One dancer chooses to pick it up, because she finally sees it as a good thing.
Throughout this process, I was finding my artistic voice. It was a learning experience for me because I’m a very sharp, dynamic dancer, and the song is the opposite. It's very slow. It has time to breathe. I'm not used to choreographing like that. I'm used to the flashy and the sharp and the fast. But I really used the tools I learned here, because they teach you so many different things that you don't learn growing up in dance studios.
Woolley: I choreograph very musically. If I hear a good piece of music that makes you want to get up and dance, I get full body chills. So I wanted to combine the jazz vibe and a little bit of hip-hop flair, just so we can bust it down a little bit and match Beyonce's vibe.
My favorite part about choreography is that you can highlight those little things that people wouldn't normally hear, but it's a lot of like trial and error. Like, what sound, what accent do you want to hit here? What texture do you want to hit here? I let the music lead me where I need to go.
Ultimately, I want to be there to entertain. It's all about joy for me.
Isabella Runion (center, with her arms behind her back) dances.
Q: What was the auditioning and casting process like?
Runion : In terms of picking dancers, it's a really long day at E. Moore Hall watching all the audition groups come through. This year, I tried to pick dancers I had never worked with before. I think about the people I see in class and if they'll fit the style and type of movement quality I want. Every dancer here is incredible, so choosing is hard sometimes. But knowing that I already had a set tone and choreographic style for the piece really helped me make decisions.
Woolley: In the casting process, the only thing going through my mind was to get as many people on stage as possible, because I want everybody to want to get up and dance at the end of the day. I love when dancers create these long lines with their legs, and the dancers I picked have the technical ability to kick high and get that wow factor.
Riggenbach: I had to really use my imagination and look for potential. Sometimes a dancer can be the best in the room, but they don't pick up the audition combos very well. Learning something right there on the spot, then having to perform it, is not everyone's strength. They're not going to showcase their best selves.
I was looking for dancers with different abilities. I didn't want seven of the same dancer—I wanted seven dancers who look different and dance different, because that's what really enriches a piece. They do the choreography the way I want it to look, but they're not going to do it how I do it, and they're not going to do it how the person next to them does it. But when they dance together, it creates this unity that’s really special to see.
Q: How did you approach the rehearsal process?
Riggenbach: My dance was six minutes long and my plan was to present two minutes at each of the three showings we had in front of faculty, so that structured our rehearsals. I didn't want to give them something unless I was truly confident with it. There were times where we'd be in rehearsal and I'd be like, “OK, we're going to skip this section because I'm not truly in love with it yet.”
One of the challenges was creating unique, quirky choreography that wasn't the same for each dancer and her flower. I gave them a lot of artistic freedom as well. I'd be like, “OK, you're going to do this with your feet, but do whatever you want with the flower. Just have this intention.” Not only was it me experimenting, it was them experimenting as well. I think it’s special when a choreographer can allow their dancers to put their own touch on it.
Every night, I told my dancers, “Dance for you, don't dance for anything else. Don't think about what comes next, just think about right now. And then whatever happens, happens. But I want you to leave the stage not regretting anything.”
Runion: I always came in with formations, knowing exactly what choreography I want to get done that day. Throughout the week, after rehearsal, I would produce more choreography, then I would come in and put that on my dancers.
I would film the dance at the end of every rehearsal. Then I would go home that night and watch it, usually slowed down. I took notes—little things I saw that I wanted to address at the next rehearsal or maybe send to my dancers before the next rehearsal.
I tried to stop myself from getting nitpicky during the beginning of the rehearsal process. Instead, I tried wait to do that until the last two or three weeks of rehearsal, when my piece was finished and I could make sure that my dancers felt comfortable with everything and it looked clean in the way I wanted.
Woolley: The whole time we rehearsed, I was saying this piece is kind of like a gimmick. You have to commit to the bit for it to read. I'd be like, “You literally have to pretend Beyonce is right behind you. You have to embody the whole persona.” And that was one of our main challenges, I think.
There are so many people in the piece who normally wouldn't touch hip-hop with a 10-foot pole. We would work through things together, using a combination of showing and repetition. They showed up every day, so willing to take in all of that information and really try to adapt to the style and step into their inner Beyonce. This has been a good experience, being able to pull that out of different types of learners and dancers.
Sarah Woolley (standing) dances.
Q: Did you get feedback from your instructors or peers leading up to “Celebration of Dance?”
Runion: We have three showings throughout the semester, where we show what we have of our piece so far to the rest of the class and the instructors. They give us some constructive criticism, some tips if they feel like we need it. That's really helpful, and it gives us some deadlines for when certain choreography needs to be out.
I got feedback on projecting out into the audience. A lot of times the stage you’re dancing on is at the ground level and the seats rise up from there. But the audience doesn't just stop in the two front rows. A lot of the feedback I got was making sure that my dancers were projecting upwards to the whole audience.
I had a note about making sure there's more connection between the dancers. The dance itself is a team effort. Even when all the dancers are doing unified choreography, if they're not connecting with each other—whether that's eye contact or the way they're moving with each other and having the spatial awareness around each other—it can sometimes seem like there's eight soloists on stage. Talking to my dancers about how they all technically represent one unit, one body, was really helpful.
Woolley: There are a lot of super complex transitions in my piece. After the first showing, one of the challenges I had for myself was to transition people on and off the stage, so they had the stamina to complete the piece. Maureen [Kaddar, a WVU Dance professor] gave me this note that made me realize I didn’t have to do the same thing every time, and the transitions came so much easier after that.
Riggenbach: I love that our professors are involved in our process, but they don't tell us how to choreograph our idea. They just help us along the way.
Yoav saw the vision I had, and he pointed out things about the relationship between the dancers with each other and each of them with their flower. And he really helped me with staging before “Celebration of Dance.” He had a great lighting cue to highlight the white flower when it comes out and make the rest of the stage dark, so it's just her and the flower.
Throughout the whole process, I wanted to take the faculty’s critiques, but I didn't want to change anything I liked. So there was some feedback that I would take and some feedback I’d say, “I'm not going to change that, because I like it. It reads for me.”
Q: Is there anything you’ve learned about choreographing from being a dancer in someone else’s piece?
Runion: When I'm the choreographer, I'm very much in the mindset of “I want to give them this choreography, have them in their places and this is exactly how they're going to do it.” In instructor rehearsals, they might just give us some formations and some basic movement and be like, “I think I might want you to face this direction, but I don't know. We'll play around with it.” They're a lot better at just throwing things at us, then formulating it later, which my brain just can't comprehend right now. I'm hoping that rubs off on me a little bit and I'll get better at doing it.
Riggenbach: Obviously, I learn a lot throughout the year with the faculty’s choreography process, but we also work with new people. I'm working with two guest artists, so I'm learning a lot about different styles. The biggest thing I’m learning is creativity with spacing and formations. It's unique to see the way the faculty and guest artists use the stage and the creativity they have to transition these formations into another formation or into a visual. I don't know how they thought of that without having us in front of them.
Woolley: My student choreographers have honestly influenced me a lot, like Izzy [Runion]. The way she effectively communicates what she needs from her dancers is so mesmerizing. I’ve been really inspired by her patience and the way she differentiates her teaching style for all different types of dancers, the way she runs a rehearsal and how she immediately knows who's going where. If something doesn't work, she always has the most obvious answer.
Lauren Riggenbach dances.
Q: How are you making the transition from “Celebration of Dance,” which was in the 150-seat Falbo Theatre, to “Dance Now!” in the much larger Clay Theatre?
Runion: I filmed my piece every night of “Celebration of Dance,” so for the first rehearsal for “Dance Now!,” we watched those videos and took notes. My second rehearsal was applying the corrections we made. I tweaked a few things I wanted to change after watching it from “Celebration of Dance.” There was a section or two that I just wasn't in love with yet, but I didn't have enough time to go back and change it before “Celebration of Dance.” Now I feel like I have a complete, beautiful piece that I'm proud of 100%.
Riggenbach: I watched the videos from “Celebration of Dance” and saw things I wanted to adjust. It's more consistency, because it looked different every night.
There are definitely a lot of changes happening prop-wise. At the end of the piece, all the dancers leave the stage but one. As the lone dancer stands on stage, flowers are thrown from the wings onto the stage by the offstage dancers.
For “Dance Now!,” Yoav had the idea to, instead of the dancers throwing flowers, have flower petals fall from the ceiling. Most of the dancers will be running around the dancer in the center while she's dancing while the petals are falling. But the white flower is still going to be thrown on stage, because I wanted it to really stand out.
Woolley: One of the struggles we had with the Falbo Theatre is that there are 12 of dancers, and I have these big, beautiful formations, but the Falbo’s a tiny space. We were nervous someone was going to kick someone in the front row of the audience, because you really are on the same level as that front row of seats.
When we were on a smaller stage, I had to start my dancers out really close together. Now that we’ll be in the Clay, which has a much larger stage, they can spread out. We also have more options to play with lighting, and I can’t wait to see the costumes sparkle under the stage lights.
Q: How does it feel to have your choreography picked for “Dance Now!” and what was your reaction when you found out?
Woolley: I was actually in Maureen and Yoav's office when the email came out. I was pulling up my courses and Maureen told me to refresh my email. It took me a second, then I was like, “Oh my gosh!” It was funny—my immediate reaction was “Y'all, do you want to be in it? How cool would it be if you were in it?”
Riggenbach: I was in Reynolds Hall waiting for class to start, and I saw the notification come up on my phone. I was like, “Oh, it's out,” so I clicked on the email, scrolled down and my jaw dropped. I was speechless to see my name on there.
We kept saying it's anyone's game this year, because everyone created something beautiful and personal. So when I saw the list, I was so excited, because this is just more proof that I did my job as a choreographer. I was so proud and happy that I had created something that proved itself.
Runion: It felt like a dream. This was the second time I choreographed for “Celebration of Dance,” so to find out this year that I was chosen for “Dance Now!” made me so happy. I feel so honored that I was picked to do this, because they make it a really big deal here. And I'm so proud of my dancers because, as much as it's my work, it's their work, too. They've worked just as hard as me, and I couldn't have done it without them.
“Dance Now!” runs Feb. 5 and Feb. 6 at 7:30 p.m. and Feb. 7 at 2 p.m. in the Lyell B. Clay Concert Theatre. Tickets are $20 for adults and $10 for children and can be purchased online at go.wvu.edu/dance-now or by calling the WVU Canady Creative Arts Center Box Office at 304-293-SHOW.
Follow WVU Dance on social media @dance_wvu and learn more about the School of Theatre and Dance at dance.wvu.edu.