Last week I had the opportunity to attend an annual regional conference of ACDA (American College Dance Association) at El Camino College. The conference covered the Baja chapter of the association with students and professors attending from local two-year and four-year dance programs. Over four very full days, the event involved dance workshops, lectures, social events, and adjudication sessions for student choreography.  A concert of student work was shown each evening, with a gala presentation of selected work culminating on the final night.

While all of the student work that I saw was excellent, I wanted to write about a few pieces that stood out to me in particular, and the first is The Human Animal (2024) by Makenna Tondro. Tondro is, at the time of writing, an undergraduate student at Cal State Fullerton.

The piece opens with five dancers dressed in tan wide-leg pants and tight-fitting, high-necked sleeveless shirts. The overall attire is clean, modern, and fashionable. They stand poised, much like mannequins and then, to the music “Display Zone” by Diskette Park, they begin to move above the space mechanically with stiff resting poses, forward-piked torsos, and angular arms. At times they appear doll-like, bending over with crooked arms like a hanging puppet. At others, they strut and pose across the stage like models in a fashion spread. The overall effective is something akin to the Stepford Wives—occupying the uncanny valley between organic and artificial, and doing it fashionably.

The piece then moves into a second song, “Horizon” by Zaria. Here, the façade begins to crack. The dancers move more aggressively and organically, leaping and sliding across the floor. The angular shapes and sustained poses of the first section are gone in favor of circular and earthbound movement. By the time the piece reaches a third song, “Subito” by Moebius, the dancers are fully aggressive. They run in circles around the stage, they push one another out of the way, they claw at one another’s bodies, and they twist and writhe toward the audience. The poised and politely restrained quintet we met at the start of the piece is gone. The human animal is fully unleashed.

The Human Animal descends through levels of human behavior—at first displaying the polished exterior that we craft with the intent to be viewed, whether by others or by ourselves, but by the end plumbing the deepest levels of desire and feeling where we exist as our raw animal selves. The piece calls on the viewers to reflect on the artificiality of the first layer and to moreover question why we, as human animals, make such a choice in the first place. Why not lean into our deeper, and perhaps truer, nature? Or is that version of the self too terrifying to confront?

The Human Animal was choreographed by Makenna Tondro and danced by Abigail Valdivia, Abigail Fernandez, Caitlin Larsen, Emmalee Idler, and Miyeko Harris, with understudy by Jillian Heiskell, costume design by Ziggy Bozigian, and lighting design by Mickey Narez.