Moving to Music

By Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo

In two short years, professionally trained dancer Kristin Mudge has taken Norfolk by storm. Graciously 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 AFA-certified fitness instructor and Kripalu-certified yoga instructor offering classes in Battell Chapel, and at _______ 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 years before, driving here from Redding, Conn. to curl and attend services at Church of Christ Congregational.

Not to be distracted by her long list of pursuits, 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,” Mudge said. The wait was short—Mudge started taking dance classes when she was eight, the beginning of a lifetime occupation with movement.

A drama major at Vassar College, Mudge moved to New York City after graduation and did an Off Off Broadway play that was “just awful.” She soon moved back to her hometown of Bedford, N.Y. to focus on dance. She trained in a small company there with the former director of the Performing Arts High School in New York City (the inspiration for “Fame”), married Grant, and moved to Redding, Conn. where they began to raise a family.

Mudge didn’t let the birth of her two children, Angus and Emmy, sideline her for long. Although she felt compelled to leave the Bedford company (the Rondo Dance Theater) when she became pregnant with her son, she soon found a group of like-minded dancers in her community.

They formed a company called the Barn Space Dance Projects in Goldens Bridge, N.Y. “We all taught each other in a very relaxed atmosphere. It was so satisfying creatively.” And children were welcome. Mudge stayed with the company for 15 years before her dance instruction started morphing into fitness instruction. “Moving to music is so much fun,” Mudge says. “You shouldn’t have to be a professional dancer to experience that.”

She started putting adult classes together that were more accessible to the masses, 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 gift 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 level in Redding and quickly moved on to the high school, where she worked with actress Diana Canova, who directed the plays. They were an excellent team, and spent 13 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 about her process for choreographing, Mudge explains that it’s actually more of a cerebral experience 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.

High school students aren’t the only recipients of her choreography work. Perhaps the furthest-reaching choreography project of Mudge’s is a piece called “Ball Room,” a light-hearted approach to ballroom dancing, complete with actual balls. The piece was selected from a large number of admissions to the Nutmeg Conservatory’s Emerging Choreographer Showcase a decade ago.