celeste fowles

Emily Watts ’03 toured with Parson’s Dance Company.

For work study, Watts runs the sound at the Center for the Arts and wound up running the light board for the Dance Masters weekend on March 11th and 12th.  Had she not been
injured, she would have been dancing that weekend.  However, she doesn’t seem to regret winding up in the lighting booth , as her technical bravura for the lighting intensive Parsons Dance Company’s show earned her the respect of the production supervisor.

"He just happened to mention they [the troupe] were going to Chile and I could come," said Watts, "and I told him I needed to talk to him seriously about it."  Although she hadn’t seen the man face to face, only spoken over the headphones, she made it quite clear she wanted to go with the troupe.  "He said if I could speak Spanish and was willing to pay for my plane ticket and sleep on the floor of his hotel room, they’d take me along." So after getting the go ahead from her folks and securing a plane ticket, she was off.  "They were just getting free labor."

Free labor or not, she managed to head south for 8 days to Santiago, Chile where the Parsons Dance Company performed 5 technically intensive shows, involving complicated lighting and dance.  In one instance, Watts used a strobe light to make the dancer appear to fly.  There were 10 dancers in the group and Watts was delighted to have buddied up to such talent.  

Though they are based in New York City, the troupe is world-renowned and tours the majority of the year,   The group drew a diverse audience of people from within Chile and as far away as Argentina.  Obviously, Watts is quite deft at the lighting board to have gleaned such rave reviews from this prestigious company.

In fact, lighting and sound design are secondary in Watt’s talents.  She is primarily a dance enthusiast and plans to major in it. 

"I like any kind of dance," she said eagerly.  At Wes, she’s taken Modern and Ballet and plans to take South Indian dance next year.  In terms of running lights and sound, Emily believes "it’s best to know everything you can about the theater," though she sounds most interested in dance.  As a "techie," she’s served as an electrician in high school, has helped behind the scenes at Winter Dance, and of course, worketd at Dance Masters. 

Watts, a proud native of Ames, Iowa, decided the East was were she simply had to go for college.  In fact, she is the first student from Ames High school to attend Wesleyan, mainly thanks to a summer she spent in Vermont at a Dance camp that made her fall in love with New England.  After that she visited Barnard and upon hating it, she was told by her uncle: "If you hated Barnard, why don’t you try Wesleyan."  Evidently this was enough to get her to visit and after a most revealing dream, she woke up one morning and knew she had to come to Wes.  Indeed she seems to have made the right choice and is carving out a nice niche in the Performing Arts community not just here at Wes, but as far south as Chile.