Moving to Music

By Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo

In two short years, professionally trained dancer Kristin Mudge has taken Norfolk by storm. Donating her time and energy to a myriad of groups and endeavors in Norfolk and the surrounding area, Mudge’s most recent undertaking was choreographing the Northwestern Regional Seven High School musical, “Chicago.”

A member of the curling club, the country club, the library associates, the congregational church and the Lions club, Mudge sings in the church choir, is an AFAA-certified fitness instructor and Kripalu-certified yoga instructor offering classes in Battell Chapel and at Valley Ballet in Canton, and manages a large vegetable operation with her husband, Grant. The fruits of that labor can be purchased at the town’s farmers market.

The Mudges bought Broadfield Farm in South Norfolk in the spring of 2010, but began making ties to this community months before, driving here from Redding, Conn. to curl and attend services at Church of Christ Congregational.

Her long list of pursuits notwithstanding, Mudge’s true passion is dance. One vivid memory from her childhood is of crawling onto a window ledge and peering into the windows of a dance studio while waiting to be picked up from Brownies. “I felt such longing for what they were doing in there,” she said. The wait was short—Mudge started taking dance classes when she was six, the beginning of a lifelong occupation with movement.

Early training took place at the Elizabeth Rockwell School of Dance in Bedford, N.Y., which was run by the former head of the dance department at Performing Arts High School in New York City (the inspiration for “Fame”). A drama major at Vassar College, Mudge delved into acting after graduation and did an Off Off Broadway play that was “just awful.” She soon moved back to Bedford to focus on dance, and started teaching in studios all over Westchester and Fairfield counties.

A couple years later, she married Grant, moved to Redding, Conn. and joined the Rondo Dance Theater, which had rehearsals in New York City. The subsequent birth of her two children, Angus and Emmy, didn’t sideline her for long. Although she felt compelled to leave Rondo when she became pregnant with her son, she soon found a group of dancers in her community that were also raising young families, and they formed a company called Barnspace Dance Project.

“We all taught each other and created pieces together in a very relaxed atmosphere. It was so satisfying creatively.” And children were welcome. Mudge stayed with the company for 15 years, doing choreography on professional dancers who performed in various venues in Redding and beyond. Before long, Mudge’s dance instruction started morphing into fitness instruction. “Moving to music is so much fun,” she says. “You shouldn’t have to be a professional dancer to experience that.”

Mudge began putting adult classes together that were more accessible to the average person and realized that the word “dance” was too intimidating for most people. “The way I enjoy music is by moving to it,” Mudge says. “It is such a gift to be able to express yourself that way, and I like to share that joy with people. I always tell people that they don’t have to be great at it.”

It was around this time that Mudge began choreographing school musicals. She started at the middle school in Redding, and quickly moved on to the high school level, where she worked with actress Diana Canova, who directed the plays. They spent 8 years together in that capacity.

Missing the connection with teenagers, Mudge walked into Regional Seven in the fall of 2011 and asked the director of last year’s production, “Jesus Christ Superstar,” if he needed any help with choreography. He gladly accepted, which gave him the ability to put “Chicago” on this spring, a project he had always wanted to do but had found daunting because of its technicality.

When asked to describe how she choreographs, Mudge explains that it’s more a cerebral process than anything else. Mudge often works at her kitchen table, sitting quietly, and will only stand up on rare occasions to catch her reflection in the glass of the oven door to make sure a movement works in practice. Another favorite place to work is in the car. “I can literally see it all play out in my head,” Mudge says.

In what now seems almost a foreshadowing, the Nutmeg Ballet contacted Mudge ten years ago about choreographing a piece for their young male dancers. She offered them “Ball Room,” a light-hearted take on ballroom dancing, originally created for the Hastings Arts Council’s Emerging Choreographer’s Showcase. Mudge would drop her son off at gymnastics in Watertown, and drive to Torrington to teach and rehearse a talented group of local kids. As fate would have it, a decade later, she’s doing much the same thing.