Shana J. Cloud '06

Stage fright has never been a term in the dance vocabulary of Expressions Dance Company co-director Shana J. Cloud ’06.

“Performance has come very easily to me over the years,” she says. In Cloud’s first performance—at the tender age of five—she replaced a soloist sick with chickenpox on the hallowed stage of Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. According to Cloud, “After having jumped across that stage in front of thousands of people, there’s nothing that can really frighten me.”

The euphoria of that first performance inspired Cloud to devote herself to rigorous technical training at Ruth Williams Dance Studio in Harlem, where she took lessons in ballet, tap, and body percussion from teachers who had danced with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Dance Theater of Harlem.

While the academic rigor of her high school, Horace Mann, didn’t allow her time to continue her technical training, Cloud became very involved with her school’s language program, which enabled her to perform in diverse cultural shows. Cloud says that she experimented with “every dance style, from Irish step, to traditional Japanese fan dancing, to tango.” High school was also where Cloud first began choreographing, through her involvement with musical theater.

Coming to Harvard, Cloud sought the right niche to continue her commitment to dance. “I wanted to do something that would enable me to choreograph and to use all of the styles that I had learned over the years,” she says. “Expressions, with its emphasis on student choreographed hip-hop and funk pieces infused with jazz and lyrical...was the perfect fit.”

With her choreography for the 2004 Cultural Rhythms show, Cloud created an unprecedented fusion of diverse styles. “I set [my] piece to an old techno song by Prodigy and literally taught the women a traditional fan dance which I infused with hip-hop to match the fast beat of the music,” she says.

Having served as co-director of Expressions since her sophomore year, Cloud’s artistic vision for the company has been to incorporate its dancers more fully into the process of putting on a theatrical production. “I’ve pushed the dancers to think about costuming, lighting, staging, and really learning to put on a full production and perform for the audience rather than just putting steps together and dancing on stage,” she says.

Cloud sought to demonstrate this vision in the piece she choreographed to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” for Expressions’ performance this past fall. “It was a murder story packed into four-and-a-half minutes. I was really able to show the dancers what I meant by thinking about more than just steps, because everyone had to know the character they were playing in order to execute their movements to the fullest.”

Always seeking to “broaden her dance vocabulary,” Cloud also danced with Boston’s West African dance troupe BeatTree this year. She has also spent summers in New York dancing with isa, a hip-hop dance company founded by Eunice J. Kindred ’02, former director of Expressions.

Cloud will present her last piece at Harvard as a part of Arts First. She describes “Visually Impaired,” which will be performed as a part of the May 6 Dance Festival, as a “study in movement for the blind,” where dancers will actually don blindfolds as part of their performance.

After graduation, Cloud, a sociology concentrator, will be returning home to New York where she plans to spend the next two years incorporating dance into her teaching at a bilingual elementary school through Teach for America. She will simultaneously pursue a master’s degree in education. “Following that, and lots of dance classes, I’ll be applying to Julliard for my MA in dance,” she says.

“I want to dance professionally, but my real long term goal is either to start my own nonprofit for dance education and performance, or to get involved with education policy and help revitalize the arts in education policy of the public school system,” she says.

Such a future was not always a given for Cloud, who considered many different kinds of work, including consulting, earlier this year. “I had an interview with Monitor Group, a consulting firm, and that was something that told me the corporate world isn’t going to work out for me because I don’t know how many sausages were made last year and I don’t care. I thank OCS for that one.”

She acknowledges that she has forsaken a career track that most would consider more secure, but argues that “even if [dance] is not a nine-to-five stable occupation it’s not something you can’t be successful at.”

And in response to the question of how to achieve that success, Cloud takes a line from Martha Graham as her mantra: “Great dancers are not great because of their technique; they are great because of their passion.”