Volume 9 Issue 1

You Can Dance if You Want To

You Can Dance if You Want To

“I tell everyone to take dance classes their freshman year,” says MacKenzie Schuller, improvisational dance enthusiast and one of three dance majors graduating this spring. For most of its existence, dance at Reed was offered as an interdisciplinary major in conjunction with other departments, including theater, anthropology, sociology, and history, not unlike a minor at other institutions. “At that time, we didn’t have enough depth and scope of class- es to support a major,” explained Reed dance professor Carla Mann ‘81. In 2014, an $80,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation transformed the department, providing funding to hire new professors and expand existing positions.