Artist Profile: Adrienne Chan ’25 — Choreography as a Relationship, Dance as its Language

Adrienne L. Chan ’25, member of the Harvard Ballet Company and choreographer of “Heathers: The Musical” and “Footloose,” among other Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club productions, is an artist with a vision.

“I'm a believer in that dance can exist as its own independent art form and not in service of something else or in context of something else, that it can be isolated from music or from text or anything, and still generate a lot of meaning,” Chan said in an interview with The Harvard Crimson.

She does not consider choreography a dictatorship, rather a horizontal relationship with the performers: The creativity of both the choreographer and the performers contributes to making dance its own entity and granting it independence.

From classical ballet to modern dance to contemporary jazz, Chan has been a well-rounded dancer since the age of two. Considering this background, she anticipated joining the Harvard Ballet Company — but participating in college theater came as an unexpected yet enthralling experience.

Her involvement with theater started when the director of the 2022 First-Year Musical, “7 Sacrilege Street,” reached out to her about being a choreographer for the show.

“I was thinking, ‘this could be a really interesting environment for me.’ And then that’s kind of when I think I got the bug,” she said.

Chan quickly fell in love with the new experience of adjusting her style and pedagogy to engage with actors.

She quickly found that working in the musical theater environment was vastly different than working with dancers in general: She noticed that actors would often put themselves down, adopting an apologetic attitude regarding what they considered to be a lack of skills for dance, but Chan considered potential.

“My work with actors is actually a lot more emotional than it is physical. Because in every single rehearsal process, it’s all about empowering them to do the moves, as opposed to adjusting the moves to make them easier,” she said.

Her eagerness to boost the actors’ confidence comes from the way she feels when dancing:

“I was a very shy kid — didn’t really want to talk too much or speak my mind,” she said. “But there’s something really audacious about taking up space and making yourself like, seen, undoubtedly, unabashedly. And so I think that dance has always been that time to put myself out there.”

Her choreographic process equally conveys her care for those she works with, and the open-mindedness with which she approaches her projects.

“Going into college, I had kind of developed, I think, my own process of creating things where I really want it to feel co-creative, that it’s not that I’m dictating or imposing my vision,” Chan said. “As much as I perhaps come up with a concept, I really wanted each individual actor or a dancer to feel like they have a stake in the ultimate product. Because that’s when it — when we — bring energy to the stage.”

Such was her experience choreographing this year’s Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s production of “Heathers: The Musical.” Though the whole journey started last spring and continued intensively during the summer, Chan did not truly choreograph the numbers until she met the actors, so that the dances fit the performers and their space.

“If I'm observing them [the actors] through preliminary auditions, through Common Casting, or just interacting with them on a daily basis, I really try to pay attention to their gestures,” Chan said. “How do they hold themselves? How do they hold their hands when they're talking? Or how do they walk around the space?”

“Because then I get a sense of, oh, this kind of motion, maybe with a more contemporary, looser style would be more fitting for this person. Or there’s also a lot of questions of ‘oh, do they prefer more stereotypically, masculine movement or feminine?’” she said.

Chan then used the performers’ natural physicality to translate her vision for each number and character. She wanted to portray the high school social dynamics in “Heathers” through the way the actors moved about the space, highlighting a contrast between the insular and introspective gestures that she envisioned for outcasts like Veronica Sawyer or Martha Dunstock, and the confident, unapologetic attitude of the Heathers.

When assessing whether a number was ready, Chan again turned to the actors and their response.

“If they're all clapping and cheering for themselves, and patting themselves on the back, then that’s how I know. Because then they’re ready to be on stage and hear other people cheer for them,” she said. “And it should all come from a place of pride and feeling ready. And that, to me, is the most important out of everything.”

Chan aims to bring innovation to her artistry, which guided much of her work with “Footloose: The Musical,” a collaboration between ¡Teatro! and the Asian Student Arts project.

“No, we don’t have the same sort of traditional movement that has been associated with ‘Footloose’ historically. But we take that repertoire of movement and translate it into a current time,” she said.

To do so, she and co-choreographer Jimena M. Luque ’25 maintained the iconic kicks and twists, but modernized the dance by taking inspiration from Chinese and Korean pop groups.

As the incoming campus liaison of the HRDC, Chan plans to translate the importance she places on cultivating the relationships among those working together in dance and theater productions.

“Something that I’ve noticed about Harvard is that if you boil it down, there are just so many institutions and organizations with competing interests,” she said.

She aspires to create connections among the various dance and theater groups on campus and burst the separate bubbles in which each exists, promoting her view of choreography as a relationship, dance as its language.