Dancers prepare for Ex-Rated, which will run at the Loeb this weekend and next week. The show comes as the dance program is struggling with the loss of Reiman Dance Center, which Radcliffe will take over.

Tonight, dancers will pirouette, shuffle and groove as they never have before.

The sold-out Loeb Drama Center’s Experimental Theater—conventionally reserved for plays and musicals—will host its first dance performance in at least a decade.

The show, Ex-Rated, comes at a critical time for Harvard’s dance program, one that has been largely rebuilt in recent years by a new director at the Dance Program at Harvard’s Office for the Arts (OFA).

Currently, over 600 people enroll each semester in the OFA’s dance classes and Harvard officially recognizes 18 student dance groups.

Although Harvard offers no academic program in dance, student work has received national awards and several students each year go on to professional ballet companies.

But dancers worry about the fate of their burgeoning programs.

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study plans to assume control of Harvard’s best dance studio—the Rieman Center in Radcliffe Yard—in 2005 and convert it into a meeting space.

For dancers, who have long struggled to gain publicity at Harvard, lobbying for the best alternative to Rieman will be a challenge.

In contrast to other arts on campus—like theater’s Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC)—the dance community lacks an umbrella organization. Some students say this leads to division within the ranks, making it more difficult for dancers to argue their needs to Harvard’s administration.

And while administrators say they are working to secure an alternate arrangement, dancers say they can think of no adequate replacement for Rieman.

Something A Little Different

Traditionally, the Loeb’s two spaces, the Mainstage and the Ex, have only been used for drama and musicals—with the exception of a few dance shows on the Mainstage.

But dance has not been performed in the small, intimate space of the Ex for at least 10 years, and is rarely performed “in the round,” with the audience circling the performers an all four sides.

Last April, three student choreographers—Adrienne M. Minster ’04, Katie F. O’Brien ’04 and Ryuji Yamaguchi ’03—decided to change this.

And so they created Ex-Rated, a collaborative project of student-choreographed dancers with student-composed music. The nine participating choreographers each created pieces that the directors blended into a single show, said the show’s producer Dan Hoyos ’03.