Redwood Dance Show; The Show Must Go On

By: Bella Aldridge

Redwood Dance has been having shows for 20 years in the LJ Williams Theater, but since everything had shut down due to COVID-19, this year’s 21 first show has had many questions, the main being if they were going to go through with it. 

In 2020, the show had been rescheduled multiple times in hopes that students and staff would be able to return to in-person performances, but ultimately it was cancelled.

Since so much has gone on from 2020-2021, this year’s Redwood Dance Show will be done virtually, the title of the show being The Show Must Go On.

Mrs. Lapp is one of the two coaches for dance at Redwood, and this is her 21st year of teaching here. Along with this, Mrs Lapp was the first dance teacher to be hired in the district!

In the first years of dance, there were only 5 classes offered; 2 Intros, Intermediate, Advanced, Dance Force. (Hip Hop and International came later. At this time, students from both Golden West and Mt Whitney were able to come over to Redwood to be on the Dance Team.

Since then, classes have doubled, Mrs. Lapp and Mrs Bardonnex teach 5 classes each.

A really hard thing for this year and the dance department in general is just switching from in-person to online classes. There was a sense of lost direction and little space to do the jumps, leaps, pirouettes, ect. 

Mrs. Bardonnex and Mrs. Lapp is putting on the first dance show and will be the regular length of the show, 2 hours. There are 30 different dances. They are hoping that, “people create little events at home with their family, a special night to view, as special as we can.” 

Dance is hopeful to have some in person performances before the end of the year, and next year hopefully have an in person dance show.

2020 had been very hard on Dance, as it was the 20th anniversary, and there were going to be some amazing performances, including alumni appearances.

Mrs. Lapp looked back on this past year and found all the many reasons why she loves doing what she does and feels very, “blessed that I could do what I do everyday… I love what I do, I just love it, and it just reminded me to not take things for granted”.

Macie Johnson ’21 is one of the co-captains of the Redwood Dance Force team. This is her 4th year on the team and 15th year of dancing in general. She explained that she had been really looking forward to her senior year since she was a freshman, but going into this year knowing that it was going to be different than her other years was scary. She remained optimistic saying, “In maybe 5 years things will be back to normal and we will look back at this year and it will be special and unique.”

She among many others are very grateful to get to continue this annual dance show tradition, this year virtually.

Tags: dance, dance show, rhs