SUMMER INTENSIVE WEEK II:

Jazz with guest faculty member Maeghan McHale plus ballet, pointe, repertory and more…

It’s been a high-energy week at the AMB Summer Intensive with guest faculty member Maeghan McHale, a past recipient of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” Award. Born in Baltimore, Maeghan trained on scholarship at Dance Theatre of Harlem and danced 13 seasons as a member of Giordano Dance Chicago, touring to locales including Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, the Netherlands, Turkey, Italy, and Israel. Her choreography has won awards at the Youth American Grand Prix [YAGP] competition and the New York City Central Park Summer Stage series. Today Maeghan is a faculty member of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School and a judge/teacher for the Youth America Grand Prix Competition.

Along with learning technique and repertory from Maeghan, Summer Intensive students this week worked on ballet, pointe, contemporary, repertory, and conditioning with AMB company artists, and continued learning sections of Erika Overturff’s ballet “The Bee’s Knees” for the Intensive’s final-day performance.

Out and about with boarding students

The Summer Intensive includes a boarding program for out-of-town students, who live in an apartment-style residence hall on the UNO campus with two adult Resident Advisors (RAs) who also are professional dancers. While dancing fills up the boarding students’ weekdays and Saturday mornings, the RAs make sure they also get leisure-time recreation with activities and outings. This week the boarders took a trip to Omaha’s Durham Museum to see its current featured exhibit, “Heroes & Villains: The Art of the Disney Costume,” and toured its collection of vintage rail cars. We’ll have more next time as the Summer Intensive wraps up its final week!