After 25 years of teaching at Cal State Long Beach, 19 premiered original dance masterpieces and two hip replacements, Andy Vaca’s latest choreography will be used to close this year’s So Cal Dance Invitational on Friday at the Ford Amphitheater.
Vaca, chair of the CSULB department of dance, jokingly looked at his wristwatch to time himself as he attempted to sum up his dance career in thirty seconds. He found that, with everything he has accomplished, this just couldn’t be done.
As an undergraduate at Sacramento State University, Vaca officially began his dancing career. He started as a jazz dancer at Sac State after three years of cheering for his school. This new dance direction led him to a “love of dance” that took him to UCLA, where he earned his MFA in Dance.
Vaca said he began working with NFL and NBA dance teams early on in his career and continues to do so today. He said he has taught, performed and choreographed halftime shows as well as performed on stage himself.
“I’ve also gotten a chance to do some really fun projects like being the assistant to Tony Award winner Twyla Tharp,” he said.
After being named department chair in 2011, Vaca learned that the bulk of his workload involved sitting in a chair behind a computer, which he says is not his favorite thing. He said his first love is teaching and had enjoyed it since he childhood, when he used to help friends with homework and violin lessons “and silly things like that.”
In Vaca’s current position, he is a “combination of judge and manager and administrator.” He said what keeps him “living and breathing” is his ability to choreograph.
“Some days I feel like I live in an episode of The Office, and other days I feel like a dancer again,” he said.
Vaca said he has premiered 19 original dance works here at CSULB over the span of his time on campus. He described the shortest of these as a five-and-a-half-minute-long quartet. Vaca said he arranged a trio last year that was very personal, and more on the quiet side.
The longest piece he ever made, which also had the most dancers that he has ever fit on the stage – approximately 18 dancers – was a piece that Vaca said he actually danced in himself.
Vaca’s most recent work was an original project that he created for the CSULB spring dance show that celebrated the 20th anniversary of the university’s dance center, which opened in 1994. For this show, Vaca said he challenged himself to create something special that would entertain an audience, and still somehow tie into the 20th anniversary theme.
He landed on a vision of a dance based on some of the names of general education requirements for CSULB students, like “foundations,” and “explorations.” Vaca’s dance is set to Pink Martini music, which he said resulted in a “perfect marriage” of music and GE categories.
“It just ended up being this weird, fun mix of Pink Martini music, and a group of people going through life together,” Vaca said to describe the end result of this special project.
Vaca’s piece in the So Cal Dance Invitational is this same project, but with different dancers. The dancers in Friday’s show are all CSULB alumni, with the exception of three dancers, who are still enrolled at CSULB. The other nine dancers in the piece are from Vaca’s dance group called Jazzworks – Long Beach.
Vaca said he is excited about seeing his original work performed in the “bi-layered space” of the Ford Amphitheater. He said these dancers have “lived just a little bit more” than the group he originally taught the piece to. This new group brings “a polish and an exciting element of humanity that maybe was missing in the original version.”
After his choreographed show for the So Cal Dance Invitational, Vaca will head to Vegas to teach yet another dance workshop to NFL and NBA dance teams.