Three Promotions for School of Dance Professors
The School of Dance is pleased to announce that three SOD professors have been promoted and awarded tenure: Melissa Bobick, Molly Heller, and Pablo Piantino. All three have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
In addition to their teaching, each of these professors engages in vibrant creative research. Learn more about these three professors and their fascinating work below.
Melissa Bobick
Melissa Bobick shared the following on her research: “I am a choreographer. My choreography has been seen internationally, nationally, regionally, and in virtual showings. The works I created have also been selected through peer-review for eleven residencies, festivals, and competitions. My creative research is rooted in an ongoing expansion of ballet’s limits. Through my research, I explore ballet’s potential for individual empowerment, growth, and healing. Mine is a process of artistic engagement that capitalizes on a non-hierarchical, personalized, and collaborative product. I am committed to using my unique artistic voice to think progressively about our art form and to reveal the ways in which ballet can evolve and benefit contemporary society.
My creative research is ballet, and my process empowers the individual. I choose to use my experience and perspective to create generative processes that are positive rather than negative for all participants. My goal is the creation of new works that draw on the dancer’s individualism, thereby creating art in which all contributions are valued. The following are some examples of my creative process at work: In February 2023, my work Apollon Musagète was remounted and performed by the Eugene Ballet Company. UNCOVERED was a new work that I originally choreographed in the fall of 2019 for eleven students in the University of Utah School of Dance. UNCOVERED has been featured in many festivals and selected as a finalist in competitions.
Molly Heller
Heller shared the following on her research: “As a hybrid artist, my research interests are multi-faceted and the threads interweave, enhance, and inform each other. My work addresses the relationship between emotion and physical expression, and the cultivation of connection—with one’s self, relationally with others, and how we locate within space. Specifically, a key component of my research is how to include movement as a healer in trauma-related therapies and wellness practices. With our rapidly shifting social, cultural, educational, political, medical, and economic climates, now is an opportunity to embrace change and to actively participate in change-making through the arts. My research approach mirrors this need for reflexivity by valuing improvisational practices, the generation of new knowledge through collaboration, creative resourcefulness, and people over product. The layers of my research create an exciting, complex web with infinite possibility for Becoming—a mutable, process-based approach and term that encompasses the quality in which I practice, create, and teach. It is a dynamic continuum of growth where value isn’t solely placed on an arrival or fixed point. Becoming is an inclusive practice in acceptance. It is also a challenge to follow desire rather than fear through investigating the hidden, stagnant, and suppressed energies within our whole self that inhibit evolution or guard us from believing in our potential. My research is conducted within choreography, directing a multi-disciplinary collective, performance, wellness practices, and teaching.”
Pablo Piantino
Pablo Piantino is a re-stager of contemporary dance and a ballet and contemporary dance educator. His creative research explores the process of deconstruction of the ballet trained body, to create the physical, mental and aesthetic conditions to let the contemporary dancing body emerge.
The collaborations he has with choreographers Penny Saunders[1] and Alejandro Cerrudo[2] are central to this research and have allowed him to maintain a significant involvement with professional dance companies and well-known collegiate dance programs. Both Penny and Alejandro are exceptional, inventive, and sought-after dance-makers who have been reshaping movement and affecting the way people see contemporary dance since they began their choreographic careers. Pablo’s role in these collaborations is of a living archive and translator of stories, anecdotes, reasoning, insights and solutions behind the movements that make the choreography. He aims to truthfully represent and translate the choreographer’s voice and hopefully their artistic vision. Pablo has restaged Penny’s and Alejandro’s choreography at Ballet Arizona, Ballet Idaho, Cincinnati Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Ballet Hagen in Germany, Tulsa Ballet, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, The Juilliard School and The University of Utah among many other institutions.