Spotlight: Rebecca J. Alaly '05

In addition to taking dance classes through the Office for the Arts since my freshman year, I perform and choreograph for several companies. This is my second year serving as Co-Ballet Mistress of the Harvard Ballet Company, meaning I run rehearsals, stage ballets, and choreograph. It’s a job I love completely! I’ve also performed in dance shows at the Loeb and I submit works for Arts First every year. On the administrative side, I’ve been doing a lot of work lobbying for a new space for dance and planning it out.

Harvard alum and dancer Ryuji Yamaguchi ’03 remarked that “Harvard has a dance program that is primarily extracurricular and open to the student body.” How true do you feel this statement is of dance and other artistic endeavors at Harvard?

I completely agree with Ryuji, who is my good friend and mentor. Even at February’s American College Dance Festival, directors from dance programs across the northeast marveled at how Harvard is able to foster such great creative work and talented dancers. We don’t have a dance major, and almost all of the work we do is extracurricular and student-run. So, we have no choice but to be creative—to take our ideas and run with them. While dance professors at other schools may formally teach their majors how to choreograph or dance, at Harvard we teach ourselves, and as a result, our artistic output is fresh and vibrant. From my experience, this is also true of the music and theatre scenes, which allows for a lot of cross-disciplinary artistic endeavors.

What inspires you, as a busy college student, to continue to participate in an art that requires such intense training?

Dancing keeps me sane. If I’m not in the studio rehearsing for a couple of hours each day, I can’t even focus on my schoolwork. Dance is amazing because it can serve so many emotional and intellectual functions. If I’ve had a great day I can get into the studio and express that, just live in that joy. If I’m stressed, I can dance something more aggressive and get out a lot of anger. And if I need to procrastinate from schoolwork, I can sit down with a pad of paper, sketching out patterns and configurations for my choreography, and still feel like I’m doing something intellectual.

Briefly describe your creative process in preparing for a performance.

I can’t put on stage makeup to save my life so I usually ask my friend, Christina Shelby, to do it for me. I also try to wear as many clothes as possible before a performance to keep my muscles warm. I might put on three shirts or sweaters, two pairs of socks and two layers of dance pants or legwarmers— I have even occasionally been known to wear scarves! I may end up looking ridiculous, like a child bundled up to go play in the snow, but this process really helps me to stay warm and clear my mind before a performance

Characterize yourself or your taste in dance projects in five words.

Quirky, delicate, subtle, twisted, and emotional

Do you have any entertaining performance stories?

The night before our big performance at February’s American College Dance Festival, the other dancers and I were preparing to iron our costumes, so we’d look our absolute best on stage the next morning’s performance. Having very little ironing experience, I wasn’t aware of the importance of setting the iron to the correct heat option, depending on the fabric. Within half a second of touching the iron to the shirt, I had singed a three-inch whole into it—the pink patch of fabric actually melted onto the iron! We had no way to replace the shirt before our performance the next morning. Luckily, Christina is a whiz with the needle and, even though a good portion of the fabric was missing, sewed it up to look like a dart in the back of the shirt. “Look at the tag before ironing,” is my new mantra.