BREMERTON — As a 17-year-old high school senior, Michelle Asencio works hard to maintain straight A’s, is in four advanced placement classes, plays music in the high school marching band, takes pilates classes every Friday and participates in hours of dance class five days a week.

Asencio has been dancing for about 13 years, and on Feb. 20 and 21, the public will have their first opportunity to see a piece Asencio choreographed in the Peninsula Dance Theatre’s Choreography Showcase.

“I got my inspiration when I got a bad grade,” Asencio said.

She said she tries to maintain a 4.0 grade point average, but after earning a B+ last year, she turned the experience into inspiration for her emerging choreographer piece in the 2016 showcase.

“I morphed that idea into the idea of a leader who falls,” she said. “They’re always in the front, the group’s following, they start to fall and then they end up in the back.”

While her “bad grade” wasn’t that bad, by Asencio’s admission, it was enough for her to turn the idea into a choreographed, contemporary modern dance with ballet elements, featuring six of her fellow dancers.

“There’s one person who’s the leader,” she said. “They go out first, and then they start to go slower than the rest of the group and then eventually they’re behind the group.”

Asencio said she’s performed in about six choreography showcases before. As a dancer, she’s partial to the modern style, with ballet a close second. She said she has a “crazy, crazy schedule” that doesn’t allow for a lot of time to relax — and if she is relaxing, she’s often doing it by watching documentaries about dance — but for her, dance is important.

“I like the way it feels,” she said. “After I dance, I feel a lot better, my body feels better. In the moment, especially during modern class, the way it feels to move through the music, it just feels really good.

“A lot of people say it’s because they can express themselves. I would say that’s not really my thing. I do feel it, but it’s not my top thing. But I also feel like dance is really truthful. You can’t go on stage and fake it very much. You can, but the audience can tell, usually.”

Madeline Mills, the lead dancer in Michelle Asencio’s choreographed piece, soars above her fellow dancers Delanie Jones, left, Nicole Malloy, middle, and Reyan Pritchard, right, in rehearsal.

Some of her favorite aspects of dancing revolve around performing. During performance week, she enjoys the opportunity to practice on a stage, instead of the studio, as well as the camaraderie of the dressing room between shows, learning the choreography and, of course, getting to actually perform for an audience.

“I just like the feeling of being on stage, that people are watching,” Asencio said. “I guess it’s feeling like, you’ve worked that hard up to that point, and then everyone’s watching you do your best and you’re kind of showing off. This is what I can do, this is how I do it, this is why I can’t go out and hang out all the time.

“This is my life.”

So much so, in fact, she plans to pursue a career in dancing.

“I don’t know if I want to be a choreographer, but I know I want to keep dancing,” she said. “Hopefully I’ll get into UW (the University of Washington). I want to double major if I can, in dance and some other subject.

“I don’t know if I could be a professional dancer, cause they look for specific body types and specific things. Like, I’m not very flexible.

“I don’t know if I could make it, but maybe as a choreographer I could.”

This year, she’s not just dancing in the showcase, but she’s showing off another skill set: choreographing.

From left, Delanie Jones, Reyan Pritchard, Lydia Caldwell and Madeline Mills in rehearsal.

“It’s really different, because you get to see what your movement looks like on multiple dancers, and you get to take something in your head and project it out, which is really interesting,” Asencio said. “I would think of patterns in my head, and I was actually able to make them work in the space, which was really cool.”

Asencio said she’d regularly get to the studio hours before her dancers were set to rehearse, to plan out the dance and figure out the moves. Though she’s been thinking about the piece for months, and found her music over the summer, she only finished choreographing a couple weeks ago.

Now, she and her dancers have to smooth things out, because in the next week, an adjudicator will be watching the emerging choreographer pieces in the Pacific region of Regional Dance America, a national association of dance companies. There could be up to 40 pieces to be reviewed this year, after which the adjudicator will pick only nine or ten to perform at a regional festival.

“That’s really stressful, an adjudicator coming to watch and judge and critique,” Asencio said.

Still, she said, “I looked forward to all my rehearsals, and there was only maybe one or two (days) that I left feeling like I could have done better. But most of the time, I left smiling, cause it felt good.”

Lead dancer Madeline Mills faces her fellow dancers Lydia Caldwell, Delanie Jones and Elise Schroeder during rehearsal.

The Choreography Showcase is an annual show for the theatre, featuring numerous dances put together from the studio, as well as guest companies. This year, a Whidbey Island studio is joining the showcase. The performances will also include music by the Bremerton Symphony and a special presentation of Peter and the Wolf.

Mallory Morrison, Peninsula Dance Theatre’s assistant artistic director, said the showcase “gives (dancers) something that kind of pushes them outside their comfort zone.”

“We do ballets they typically know … they know the stories,” Morrison said. An example would be the annual performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. “When they do the choreography showcase, they have no idea what they’re getting into.”

Two of this year’s choreographers, including Asencio, are considered “emerging choreographers,” with little to no experience in choreographing, Morrison said.

Morrison said that the uniqueness of the showcase is also an appealing factor to the audience.

“Most people who come to the show, they tell us it’s their favorite show, because it’s so different,” Morrison said. “Most people don’t seem to know about it because it’s not a story, but you get to see such fascinating work.”

The Peninsula Dance Theatre’s 2016 Choreography Showcase will be at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 20 and 3 p.m. Feb. 21 at the Admiral Theatre, 515 Pacific Ave., Bremerton. Tickets start at $14, and are available at www.admiraltheatre.org/tickets. For more information, visit www.pen insuladancetheatre.org.

Photos by Michelle Beahm