When the curtain goes up tonight, graduate dance students Kristina Isabelle and Valerie Alpert hope that their audience will see the two common threads that brought their performances together for their graduate dance concert, “Moving Words: An evening of movement adaptations of literary works.””We worked very separately on our pieces, but because both of us incorporated dances inspired by literary text and also used similar technology, we put both of them into the same program,” Isabelle said.Alpert will be presenting her program based on the works of author Theodore Geisel, who is best known as Dr. Seuss. However, Alpert doesn’t want her audience to see only the literary side of this famous author.”This is not going to be an adaptation of ‘The Cat in The Hat,’ because that is only one portion of him,” Alpert said. “He was also a great documentary writer, which is what I am focusing on.”Alpert has choreographed her dance to show the creative mind of Geisel and also keep the humor of Dr. Seuss. Alpert has based her program on two of Geisel’s books, “The Sneetches” and “Yertle the Turtle.””He was such a great thinker and I wanted to show this man’s creative process through dance, but with a twist of humor to it,” Alpert said.Alpert became interested in Geisel after she received an offer for Dr. Seuss books in the mail.”All my work had been pure dance movement and I had never done something very theatrical, so who better than Dr. Seuss?” Alpert said. “After researching more about him, I became even more interested in him and his life.”Throughout the piece, Alpert choreographs her nine dancers through the various themes of Geisel’s life, showing Geisel as Dr. Seuss and in his other professions in life: businessman and documentary film director.For the second performance, Isabelle has also chosen a one-act play, “No Exit,” which was written by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, as her background to her choreographed piece. In the play, three main characters are brought to the realization that they have lived their life in bad faith and will spend death in Hell. “I have always wanted to do this, because I really believe that my movement in dance is parallel to this story,” Isabelle said. Making the change from literary text to a form of dance movements was the most complicated for the choreographers.”I went through the whole play and really looked to find where movement could be used to portray the character’s expressions,” Isabelle said. “A lot of situations from the play are still there, but I focused mostly on the themes that he explored.”Isabelle also maintained several of the speaking parts from the play to show character complexity, which brought more challenges to her dancers.”We all come from more of a dance background, so that was our greatest challenge in doing this,” said Katy Orthwein, who plays Inec. “In the book, the characters are very two-dimensional and melodramatic, so the acting was needed to make these characters real.”Alpert, in developing her character’s movements and interactions for the stage, had to look further into Geisel’s book visually.”It was really the hardest part for me, because of everything I had to look for – how colors were used, how these characters looked visually, and even how the characters were positioned in the book – then I was able to decide how each character would move,” Alpert said.To express the text even further, Isabelle and Alpert also brought in a multimedia format to each of their choreographed pieces. Isabelle will be using video footage that was filmed by Sasha Wolf for certain character scenes and Alpert will be using animation for set design and video footage from Geisel’s documentary, “Hitler Lives.””It has been a challenge in trying to incorporate all of these elements, the dance movements to the video footage,” Isabelle said. “But I want the audience to fully understand the characters and come away from the performance knowing what I was trying to portray in the choreography.””Moving Words: An evening of movement adaptations of literary works” runs tonight through Saturday at the Sullivant Hall Theater, 1813 N. High St. All shows will begin at 8 p.m. Admission is $3.