Suzanne Ostersmith's office is a time capsule commemorating Gonzaga University's 25-year-old dance program. Starting near the floor of one side, a line of posters climbs up and halfway around the room showcasing every single spring concert and dance performance she's produced for the university.
She keeps them as a reminder of all the change and growth she's fostered for dancers at Gonzaga since she founded the program in 2000. Once she retires at the end of this school year in May, all of these posters will find their way onto an already designated wall in her Browne's Addition home.
At the start of the millennium, Ostersmith was working as an adjunct dance professor at Whitworth University. However, after the head of Gonzaga's theater program saw her choreography, they asked her to consider teaching at GU. She jumped at the opportunity and started teaching there soon afterwards.
"I really fell in love with the students immediately and just started teaching one class a semester, then it became two, and then it became producing the spring dance concert, and then it became more and more," she says.
After teaching classes for years, Ostersmith founded the university's dance minor in 2006. A few years later, in 2010, dance and theater became a joint department. In 2018, the program expanded further to begin offering a major in dance.
This weekend, Gonzaga's two-day Spring Dance Concert at the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center honors those achievements and many others that have made Ostersmith proud over the years. She also hopes the concert and festivities around it reach people who aren't necessarily dance fanatics.
"Dance can be very abstract, and I think that that's hard for some audience members, but what's so powerful about this spring dance concert is there is a real variety," she says. "It's a really energetic celebration of our last 25 years, and over 60 alumni are taking time off work and flying here from all over the nation to see the concerts and to reconnect with us and our current students."
Fighting for the arts is often challenging, but through the years Ostersmith took it all in stride. Every Gonzaga dance class, production and afterschool program are pieces of a puzzle that she began putting together 25 years ago.
"We had to be scrappy to create this program," she says. "We're sitting in a building that was used for fixing trucks back then, and now it's our theater and dance building with beautiful studios and offices next door."
In her time at Gonzaga, cultivating a community of thoughtful, talented dancers who can gracefully interact with the public has been at the forefront of Ostersmith's mind. It's why she worked hard to build programs like Dance for Parkinson's, where folks with Parkinson's disease and their care partners come every Saturday for a dance class, and ZagDance, a free afterschool program for elementary school kids.
She says it's also been a place where dancers of all skill levels can feel supported and enjoy their education.
"An important part of Gonzaga dance over the years is that we're not a conservatory program. It's not only students who are going to dance professionally that can be here," she explains. "We really believe that everyone's desire to dance needs to find a home, and we can be a home for those students."
When Angela Boulet graduated from high school and went to Seattle University to study psychology, she says she became more depressed than she'd ever been. At first she assumed it was just the new situation she was struggling to adapt to, but she soon realized her woes were caused by a lack of tapping toes.
Boulet, who began dancing when she was a toddler, felt this way because for the first time in nearly two decades she didn't have anywhere to dance.
"I just didn't get at 18 that going to college and putting that aside would be a big deal. But then it was like my whole life is different and not in a good way," Boulet explains. "I always say that emotion is energy in motion, and so therefore, when you're not moving you have stuck energy in your body."
Once she made this realization, she moved back home to Spokane and transferred to Gonzaga. She continued studying psychology but added a dance minor to her studies. Boulet graduated with her bachelor's in 2018 but came back to school the next year to turn her dance minor into the recently created dance major.
In 2019, Boulet earned her second degree and became the first person to graduate from Gonzaga with a bachelor's in dance. Now working as a San Diego-based health and wellness specialist, Boulet credits Ostersmith with helping her succeed.
"She was my anchor. She was the reason that I propelled so deeply into dance," she says, choking back tears. "There is no one like that woman. She is perseverant. She is resilient, and she is the biggest shining star of the whole university because she literally dedicated her everything to this program."
Ostersmith loves every aspect of her job. Those relationships with her students (and now alumni) are a huge reason for her longevity at Gonzaga, but 25 years is a long time for anything. While she admits that she's tired after all these years, Ostersmith feels like Gonzaga Dance is ready to be molded by a new hand.
"I have an entrepreneurial spirit. I was raised with that. And so this idea of creating a program and building it over time was very natural for me. Now we're at this really gorgeous, thriving position," she says. "This has been a heck of a 25-year journey, so there's a sense of fatigue. But more than that, Gonzaga Dance is ready for different leadership to see where it's supposed to go next."
Although she's retiring, Ostersmith isn't quite finished with Gonzaga Dance. After watching ODC Dance perform the whimsical children's story The Velveteen Rabbit in February, the department's new leader, Cynthia Gutierrez, asked Ostersmith whether she was willing to come back and craft a similar performance.
"So I'm retiring, but I've been hired back as an adjunct coming full-circle to create Thumbelina, a story ballet," Ostersmith says. "I love musical theater and creating stories through dance, so it'll be based on that idea of The Velveteen Rabbit. It teaches our students how to create dance for children audiences and even how to work the kiddos into the show." ♦
Gonzaga Spring Dance Concert • Fri, April 25 and Sat, April 26 at 7:30 pm • $8-$15 • Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center • 211 E. Desmet Ave. • gonzaga.edu/dance
