Senior Spotlight: Grace Vincent discusses artistic performance through her own lens
Photo courtesy Grace Vincent
Grace Vincent may be a natural entertainer. As soon as she could walk and talk, she was drawn to the world of stage performance, and, over the years, she flourished into an accomplished ballet dancer and thespian. Vincent’s love for the performing arts led her to pursue filmmaking and dance theater at Rice, with the ultimate goal of crafting meaningful stories for her audience.
Vincent, a Brown College senior, started out with a theatre concentration before transitioning to a film concentration, since she wanted to explore filmmaking as a new medium to deliver her own artistic visions.
“My whole life, I was trained as a ballet dancer, and I did a ton of theatre in high school. Film was an extension of all those interests, and I really enjoyed learning the craft of filmmaking and storytelling and being able to produce my own content,” Vincent said. “I love the freedom you get with the film major; it’s really about supporting what you want to do, and there are resources for you to make that happen. I’ve had amazing teachers and incredible peers in my classes helping me gain technical skills to say what I want to say through film.”
As someone who has studied at Rice both before and throughout COVID-19, Vincent said that filmmaking in the ongoing pandemic has been isolating at times.
“Being a film major during this pandemic has honestly been a bit isolating because I haven’t been able to connect with a lot of people,” Vincent said. “A lot of the projects that I’ve done, I’ve done on my own time, alone.”
The process of creating her documentary provided Vincent with a taste of the connection she was missing.
“That project was the first thing I got to do as the world was really opening up, so it was incredible,” Vincent said. “As I turned 21, [I got] to reflect on some of my favorite places that I like to go to and show a spotlight on those, because the queer nightlife community is very much a haven in Houston, and it’s hard for those places to stay open.”
Vincent has also explored opportunities outside of Rice. Starting last summer, she has been interning remotely for a Los Angeles film production company to learn more about the scriptwriting, shooting and casting processes.
“I work with the studio development team, so it’s a lot of reading scripts, and then I get to work on the project and figure out, from the ground up, what goes into making a production,” Vincent said. “I help the development team with casting, and work with the directors and the writers in bringing the entire production together.”
Beyond her experience in filmmaking at Rice, Vincent is a choreographer and the social officer for Rice Dance Theater, which she has been a member of since her freshman year. Although Vincent grew up performing ballet, she fell in love with the freedom of contemporary dance.
“I was born and raised as a very classically trained ballet dancer, and that’s a very rigid, strict technique. My favorite classes were always getting to undo a little bit of my technique,” Vincent said. “I love contemporary so much. I love how the movement feels in my body, and getting to break away from the structure and rigidity of ballet and feel that freedom. I can’t always express myself in words, but I can through dancing.”
Vincent said that her favorite part of dancing in RDT is leaving an impact on the audience after every performance.
“The show is always the most rewarding thing,” Vincent said. “We put so much work in throughout the entire semester, and it’s crazy: you’re backstage and the show’s about to start and you hear the audience starting to trickle in. Dancing in the show feels like a dream, honestly.”
It is this relationship with the audience that inspires Vincent’s desire to pursue a career in the entertainment industry.
“It’s my favorite thing to do, and that’s also why I want to pursue a career in entertainment. I love to bring joy out of people and inspire people,” Vincent said. “That’s my purpose: to bring entertainment to people.”
Vincent’s senior film thesis is an amalgamation of her love for film and dance. Because she is uncertain about the role dance will play in her life post-graduation, she envisions her thesis both as a tribute to her years spent dancing and as a reflection of this monumental transition in her life.
“It’s going to be a sort of “Black Swan:” a very dark, dramatic, interesting, slightly horror project, to pay homage to my dance background and also say goodbye to it,” Vincent said. “I don’t know when I’m going to be able to dance again, and that’s honestly frightening to me. It was such a huge part of my life. That’s the last thing that I want to create here: something that is tied to all the blood, sweat and tears, quite literally, that I have put into being a dancer for my whole entire life.”
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