{"id":5677,"date":"2017-04-12T08:00:16","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T16:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wou.edu\/westernjournal\/?p=5677"},"modified":"2017-04-11T16:26:44","modified_gmt":"2017-04-12T00:26:44","slug":"artist-spotlight-kristie-martinez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/artist-spotlight-kristie-martinez\/","title":{"rendered":"Artist spotlight: Kristie Martinez"},"content":{"rendered":"
By: Ashton Newton\r\nEntertainment Editor<\/pre>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the most part I just always thought that I would be a dancer, so education is now something I\u2019m tackling because I want consistency in my career,\u201d said Martinez.<\/p>\n
Martinez moved to Oregon from the California Bay Area with her daughter to attend Western\u2019s dance program.<\/p>\n
\u201cI moved up here to pursue the academic end of dance, I decided randomly that I wanted to be a professor of dance,\u201d said Martinez. \u201cI\u2019d been doing a lot of the small companies in the Bay Area and a lot of modern companies, and pay isn\u2019t always great and rarely do you get health benefits. There really is no assurance.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Through that, Martinez was connected to the Rainbow Dance Company, who she has been with ever since.<\/p>\n
\u201cI joined the company and I\u2019ve been with them for three years. I\u2019m going to continue with them for a fourth year before I go to grad school,\u201d said Martinez. \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019s been a good blend.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martinez says that her biggest accomplishment of a dancer has been finding her voice.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I found a style of dance called \u201crelease technique,\u201d it\u2019s an anti-movement to the formatted Graham and Limon, it\u2019s all about freedom and releasing, using organic movement. When I found that it was like \u2018yeah, that\u2019s me, that\u2019s what I want.\u201d<\/p>\n
When she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m 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\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martinez\u2019s goal is the be a dance professor and have a resident company.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to leave some sort of teaching philosophy. I have one mentor here, Les Wantanabe. To me, he\u2019s 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\u2019d be awesome.\u201d<\/p>\n
Contact the author at journalentertainment@wou.edu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. \u201cFor the most part I just always thought that I would be a dancer, so education […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":937,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/937"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}