With all of the dancing junior Marian Woznica does, one would think she has something like Restless Leg Syndrome. On her Tufts application, she wrote that her first step was, in fact, a dance step. Her essay examined how dance breaks down barriers between people, a phenomenon with which Woznica had firsthand experience when she worked with refugees during high school. Dance helped ease tensions in the space, breaking down linguistic and cultural barriers, she said.
Woznica, who is studying international relations and history, spends a considerable amount of time honing and performing her craft.
“Particularly in my academic areas, I’ve found it difficult to balance an intense dance course load with the different academic activities I pursue,” Woznica said. “I’ve dabbled in a lot of different things, but I haven’t really found my dance niche.”
Although the interplay of her academic and dance pursuits can prove difficult at times, Woznica said that dance is always a rejuvenating outlet for her creativity and a way to cope with academic stress. The modern dance course she took in the fall semester of her sophomore year was incorporated a little bit of both.
Woznica has also appeared in Tufts Dance Collective, the spring 2015 production of “At the Vanishing Point,” by Tufts' umbrella student theater group Pen, Paint and Pretzels (3Ps), Tufts Tap Ensemble (which she insists is an extremely underrated club at Tufts) and, now, in Tufts Burlesque Troupe.
“I was in a duet of Orpheus and Eurydice,” Woznica said, describing a scene in which she appeared in the 3Ps production. “I danced out a girl’s death, which was kind of cool. Also a blind girl’s vision of what it would be like to see and what her future would be. Getting to dance in Balch Theater, in the round, was really cool, because getting to dance with people 360 degrees around you isn’t something you get to do in a performance environment all that often.”
Keep an eye out for Woznica on campus stages throughout the semester.
Dances rejuvenates junior Marian Woznic
