PAMS student receives Performing Arts Award from ARTS NC STATE

Ashley Walls

June 17, 2011

ARTS NC STATE has announced the recipients of their 2010-2011 Performing Arts Awards. Made possible by a grant from the NC State Foundation, these awards recognize student achievement in the performing arts at NC State University. PAMS graduate student Ashley Walls was among the five awardees, receiving the Creative Artist Award for Dance.

Here is more information on Walls and her award from ARTS NC STATE:

The Creative Artist Award recognizes original work in music, dance and theatre created by full-time NC State students. A committee of music, dance and theatre faculty reviews submissions made annually of original work in the fields of music, dance and theatre, and chooses the artists who best exemplify the award(s) for Creative Artist. The winning creative artists each receive $500 with acknowledgement in the following year’s ARTS NC STATE playbill. A corresponding $1,000 grant will be given to the appropriate ARTS NC STATE program or department to assist in producing the selected work in performances by the Music Department, Dance Program and/or University Theatre in 2011-2012.

Ashley Nicole Walls recently completed undergraduate degrees at NC State in Mathematics and Philosophy, and will be a first-year math graduate student in the fall. Walls is from Gastonia, NC, has been with the NCSU Dance Company for four years and will continue in the fall. In 2010, Walls' choreography, "but today they’re all gone" – Mr. Davis, was selected to be performed in the regional gala at the American College Dance Festival Association’s Mid-Atlantic Conference, and the dance was first alternate to go to the ACDFA National Gala at the Kennedy Center. Additionally, in fall 2010, Walls was selected to present this work at the State of North Carolina Undergraduate Symposium on Research and Creativity. As an independent study student over the last four years, she created a total of four choreographic works which have been performed in Dance Program concerts.

Walls described her winning work, That One Should Always, as a modern dance exploring the tragedy of divorce and our inability to manage feelings of personal failings. Robin Harris, director of the Dance Program, said that "the strengths of Ashley's project proposal include innovative structural ideas, depth of content, original movement vocabulary, and clear foundation and plans for exploration and choreographic development. The thematic movement language, inspired by the poetic language of Edna St. Vincent Millay in Intention to escape from Him and Modern Declaration, contains rich visual imagery which contributes to the originality of Ashley’s choreographic ideas. That One Should Always promises to reveal psychological layers of a relationship through sound craft, fresh imagery, and interesting metaphor (such as an inverted or deconstructed pas de deux). The intelligence behind Ashley’s project is very clear, and her casting decision will insure that the depth of her work will be translated on the stage."

ARTS NC STATE is an umbrella organization comprised of the six visual and performing arts programs of North Carolina State University: Center Stage, The Crafts Center, Dance Program, Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Music Department and University Theatre. Each year, ARTS NC STATE provides hundreds of outstanding arts opportunities for both the campus and the greater community.