PHOTO GALLERY AND STORY: Spectrum City Dance "cell"ebrates another successful season

The Spectrum City Dance studio put on a spirited and thought-provoking performance in their year end recital at the Lester Centre on Saturday, June 22.

Entitled “Cindy’s Cell”, the dance numbers were designed to not only showcase the talents of the school’s students, but also to examine our relationship with technology in the digital age.

“It’s a concept that we’ve been thinking about since last summer,” said Ella Ferland, Spectrum’s instructor. “The message is that we all go through these periods where we feel disempowered. And teenagers and young children in our society, it happens a lot.”

Spectrum City Dance recital, June 22, 2019 (Jenna Cocullo / The Northern View)

Audience members followed Cindy, played by Zosia Stevenson, a high school girl who lost her cell phone after a mixup with her sister. Guided by the fairy Fay, Cindy spends the rest of the day embarked on a journey around her school to retrieve the lost device.

During the adventure, Cindy encounters a variety of eclectic characters, played by every age group of the Spectrum dance ensemble. Visuals played a key role as well, with the projection screen featuring a number of works by Paul Cox to guide us through Cindy’s venture throughout the school. A walking manifestatin of her cell phone, along with an exploding flurry of bats were some of the more striking displays.

By show’s end Cindy has recovered her phone — revealed to be in her sister’s backpack the whole time — but more importantly learned the rewards of taking time to unplug from her device.

Spectrum City Dance recital, June 22, 2019 (Alex Kurial / The Northern View)

“Kids have way more pressure on them than ever before,” said Ferland. “They have the internet which is the source of great knowledge, but also the source of comparing yourself to everybody else.”

Spectrum City Dance recital, June 22, 2019 (Jenna Cocullo / The Northern View)

The closing number set to the lyrics of Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’, “stop callin’, stop callin’, I don’t wanna talk anymore,” show us that Cindy has emerged from the experience having processed a valuable lesson about the effect of smartphones on our lives.

Spectrum City Dance recital, June 22, 2019 (Jenna Cocullo / The Northern View)

“We’ve been practicing for weeks after school, for a couple hours,” said Stevenson who spoke after the show about the long preparation that went into pulling off the detailed performance.. “We started just after the competition season ended, so about a month and a half.”

Spectrum City Dance recital, June 22, 2019 (Jenna Cocullo / The Northern View)

Stevenson’s range of artistic skills was on full display during the show. In addition to her dancing, Stevenson put her choreography abilities to work as well, responsible for choreographing the “All We Do” dance number.