Caity Healy | Managing Editor

With Western Oregon’s Creative Arts Division as robust and successful as it is, with several programs and departments, students involved in it often choose to get involved in the arts in their community beyond the ways they are offered on campus. One such student is Noah Nieves Driver. 

Nieves Driver is a senior at Western, currently in his second year of the ASL/English Interpreting Program. On top of this, he has been a dancer for nearly as long as he can remember. 

“I started dance when I was three. And I continued with that all the way until I was 9-ish, then I got back into it when I was 13,” Nieves Driver explained. While he can’t pinpoint the exact reason he stopped at age nine, he can remember exactly what inspired him to start again at 13.

“I saw Alvin Ailey perform in my hometown, Tacoma, Washington, and I was like, ‘I want to get back into this,’” Nieves Driver recalled.

While his history with dance has been long and extensive, an opportunity for him to do something new came up in the summer of 2019: choreograph a show titled “Next to Normal” — this was his musical choreography debut.

“I choreographed a play in high school … and I took the choreography sequence here at WOU, so I learned how to choreograph for myself,” Nieves Driver said. “But show-wise, this is the first actual show I’ve choreographed.” 

Nieves Driver has been involved in local theater in the neighboring communities to Monmouth for awhile, and when he heard that the Majestic Theatre in Corvallis, Oregon was putting on “Next to Normal” —  a show about a suburban household coping with mental illness, delving into the ways a mother navigates her illness and the treatments that go along with it, as well as the impact it has on her family — he contacted the director, Ruth Mandsager, to see if she’d be interested in him doing the choreography.

“I love the show, I love the people who are a part of the production, and I just had this vision for it and I was like, ‘I want to see this come to life,’” he added. Mandsager gladly accepted his offer, and they got to work. Nieves Driver explained that the songs are very grounded in reality, and therefore wanted to make sure there was a purpose to the choreography that he was planning.

“I just listened to the songs a lot … I tried to understand what the characters were feeling,” Nieves Driver said. “I was working with the music,” he added, asking himself things like, “‘okay what is the music doing here? Oh, it’s accenting that. Let me follow that or let me do the opposite to create some contrast with that.’” 

As a choreographer, Nieves Driver felt elated by how this process went, and explained that, ideally, this is just the beginning.

“I’m hopeful that I can get in — at least in this area — as a prominent choreographer, and then hopefully become a director so that I can cast more people of color in traditionally white roles,” he explained. “In this area, there aren’t a lot of opportunities for people like me, like black people, to get cast in stuff … so with traditionally white roles … why is it traditionally white? Is it connected to the story? Is it about race? If not, then why does that matter? So, there wasn’t a lot of work here for me as a dancer, so that’s kind of why I went into choreography. But I think I’m going to focus more on that, and less on the dance aspect.”

“Next to Normal” does have a content warning under the Majestic Theatre’s website, as it includes subject matter and language regarding depression, self-harm, drug abuse and suicide. 

For those interested in seeing the show, there are still a few more opportunities. It runs Nov. 13–16 at 7:30 p.m., and Nov. 17 at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $16 for students, $18 for adults, and only $10 for those that go Thursday, Nov. 14. 

“Support local theater, we really need it,” Nieves Driver commented. “Everybody has been putting their full heart into this show and I think you can see that from just watching it.”

Contact the author at chealy16@wou.edu

Photos courtesy of Mark Hoffman (play)

Photo by Caity Healy (headshot)