By: Ashton Newton
Entertainment Editor

For Western student Kristie Martinez, senior dance major, following her passion is what college is all about. Dancing since she was three, Martinez says that she has always known that she wanted to dance.

“For the most part I just always thought that I would be a dancer, so education is now something I’m tackling because I want consistency in my career,” said Martinez.

Martinez moved to Oregon from the California Bay Area with her daughter to attend Western’s dance program.

“I moved up here to pursue the academic end of dance, I decided randomly that I wanted to be a professor of dance,” said Martinez. “I’d been doing a lot of the small companies in the Bay Area and a lot of modern companies, and pay isn’t always great and rarely do you get health benefits. There really is no assurance.”

“I randomly said teaching makes sense for me now, so I just went for it. Someone told me about Western and I applied and got it and moved my daughter and I up here. Immediately I was notified through the dance department here that one of the professors, Darryll Thomas, that him and his wife run a company and that if you wanted any possible teaching jobs to get your resume in immediately.”

Through that, Martinez was connected to the Rainbow Dance Company, who she has been with ever since.

“I joined the company and I’ve been with them for three years. I’m going to continue with them for a fourth year before I go to grad school,” said Martinez. “It’s a touring company, we perform in the spring dance concert, we go to Canada a lot. I love it, it allows for a lot of creative freedom. I can continue my performance and then pursue the academic end. It’s been a good blend.”

Martinez says that her biggest accomplishment of a dancer has been finding her voice.

“When I found a style of dance called “release technique,” it’s an anti-movement to the formatted Graham and Limon, it’s all about freedom and releasing, using organic movement. When I found that it was like ‘yeah, that’s me, that’s what I want.”

When she’s not dancing, Martinez also loves cooking and reading about mythology. Martinez loves that many rituals can be shown and told about through dance, which has helped to influence some of her dancing at Western.

“I’m actually a mythology nut. I love mythology and cultural anthropology. I love to read books on myth and my overall goal of dance is to merge the two. I’ve done two pieces here at Western, one was based on voodoo ritual and the second was based on the Native American process possession and their beliefs on that.”

Martinez’s goal is the be a dance professor and have a resident company.

“I want to leave some sort of teaching philosophy. I have one mentor here, Les Wantanabe. To me, he’s one of those teachers whose lessons will be repeating in my mind for the rest of my life. I want to be that teacher, if I could be that one day, that’d be awesome.”

Contact the author at journalentertainment@wou.edu