Huddling in a circle with her arms around her fellow dancers, Annie McGovern ’18 listened on as Judith Wombwell, Instructor and Chair in Theatre and Dance, gathered the group together to express her immense pride in their hard work and accomplishments before the dancers entered on stage to perform the Andover Dance Group (ADG) Show “Appalachian Spring” during their tour around San Francisco last winter, according to McGovern.
McGovern, who will be a co-head of the Dance Board for the 2017-2018 school year, describes her experiences traveling and performing with the dance department as one of her earliest dance memories and a turning point in her transformation from a timid dancer to a leader of the dance community at Andover.
“It was just really fun because all of my friends went and we all kind of traveled together and we got to know each other better as people and it kind of transformed our relationship into something better… I think it’s cool to think back on when we were Lowers and excited to go on this trip and be like, ‘Oh, we’re with all the ADG people, this is cool,’ that was before any of us were on ADG, and now we’re the leaders,” said McGovern.
From her own experiences as a Junior, McGovern hopes that, with her role as a co-head of the Dance Board, she will be able to help make younger and newer dancers feel more welcomed and comfortable within the dance community.
“[I just want] to be a person that new or younger dancers could come to and someone that would welcome them into the community. [As a Junior myself] I was always afraid to overstep and invite myself where I wasn’t welcome, and I really want to make the new dancers know that, ‘Hey, you can come change in our ADG dressing room,’ and ‘Hey, talk to us before class, we would love to bring you into our dance community sooner and faster,’ ” said McGovern.
Looking forward, McGovern is excited to collaborate with the other members of the Dance Board, especially the other co-head, Alexa Goulas ’18.
“Alexa and I have become much closer friends over the past two years and we kind of have a similar sense of humor… [and] I think that’s great because we’ll be comfortable with each other and we’ll bring an ease to any discussion that we have,” said McGovern.