Drew Yenchak Point Park University's Kassandra Taylor rehearses her piece "Disconnected Connection" for the Playhouse Dance Company's Student Choreography Project, which will be performed this weekend.

Artists must face a blank canvas when creating a new work, but choreographers must face a color palette of living, breathing dancers. At Point Park University, those dancers are fellow students, some of them friends and acquaintances.

		Playhouse Dance Company Where: Pittsburgh Playhouse, Oakland. When: 8 p.m. Friday; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. Program "A" will run Friday night and Saturday afternoon with Program "B" the last two performances. Tickets: $12-$14; 412-621-4445 or www.pittsburghplayhouse.com.

That makes it even harder for the young choreographers who will display new works on the Student Choreography Project this weekend at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in Oakland.

But they've come a long way since Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland decided to put on a show.

The Playhouse Dance Company will be sporting a record number 23 choreographers in its 20th year of production. The process started with an application that was submitted over the summer, listing choreographic concepts, music choices, props, scenic design and casting. It all came quickly to a head the first week of classes in September, when approximately 200 students gathered to audition one night for only four hours.

Grouped by class and rotating between studios each hour, the dancers learned phrases from the various choreographers, who then met to choose their performers.

"You barter for who you want," says senior dance major Kassandra Taylor, who is a veteran at the age of 21. She snagged all of her first choices. Her choreography has already been selected for the Regional Dance Association in high school and last year's Point Park piece was chosen for the American College Dance Festival Association nationals at Kennedy Center.

Senior Dan Karasik appreciatively notes how the dancers improved over the course of a year -- his piece went to the ACDFA regional competition last year.

In the studio, the experienced pair clearly demonstrate how differently the students work on their pieces. It's a case where he wants to move softly to carry a big choreographic stick and she chants "room, boom, bah boom" with a soft Southern accent.

Karasik carries a detailed notebook around with him on "no todo lo que brilla es oro," a work set to Jewish secular music from Spain's Golden Age. Taylor first went into her own studio back home and created movement (with "very little accents that I can blow up dynamically") for her latest work, "Disconnected Connection." Then she took time in August to set some initial phrases from Thomas Newman's "Erin Brockovich" score on high school students from the Atlanta studio where the Georgia native had trained.

Both are combining contemporary dance and ballet with Karasik trying "to break some of my own rules" in his flowing piece and Taylor creating an urban feel with the women en pointe and the men in bare feet. "I'm pushing the limits ... so pointe is not looked at from a classical point of view," she says.

Even though their concepts come from opposite ends of the spectrum, they also have learned that the dancers help to shape their material. Sometimes mistakes make their way into the choreographic fabric, but Taylor says she often keeps it.

"Even though they're disconnecting with each other, there has got to be a [sense] of natural movement when it comes to the steps," she says. Karasik, on the other hand, tries to "work with people to get a result that they might not be expecting."

Different in so many ways, Taylor and Karasik see eye to eye on one thing. Both are eyeing a choreographic career and see this Student Showcase as a step in the right direction.