This year’s First Year Showcase is almost here, and the actors and dancers are ready to shimmy, twist and shake this weekend at I.G. Greer Theatre.

The First Year Showcase, an annual collaboration between the theatre and dance departments, aims to integrate freshman and first-year transfer students interested in the university’s performing arts.

Within a few days of arriving at school, these students are put through the audition process. After that, they have three weeks until show time to learn all of their choreography.

“Coming here, I was already used to having to dance all the time, all week,” freshman undecided  major Hannah Primo-Squire said.

While she never danced for her high school, Primo-Squire said she danced competitively in a studio for several years.

“This is a good introduction to college dance, because it’s different than what I came from,” she said.

Primo-Squire is currently undecided as a major, but she said she knows she wants to minor in dance.

Freshman dance studies major Emily Goodall said she started taking school dance classes during her sophomore year of high school, partly because she said she thought they would be easy grades. Goodall ended up loving it, and after her older sister, junior apparel design and merchandising major Haley Goodall, heard  her little sister was coming to Appalachian, she looked up everything that the school offered in regards to it.

One of the things she came across was the First Year Showcase.

“The upperclassmen are very helpful, a lot more helpful than you’d think,” Emily Goodall said.

“Because some people in this department are a little competitive. But [the upperclassmen] just want to help you learn.”

For the theater portion of the showcase, performers will use excerpts from Studs Terkel’s book “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.”

The First Year Showcase runs Thursday through Saturday  from 7:30 to 9 p.m. Tickets are $5 for students and $8 for faculty, staff, adults and seniors.

Story: R. SCOTT MORRIS, A&E Reporter