In another life, perhaps, Charles O. Anderson would have been an engineer.
As a scholarship student at Cornell University, he was headed down that path until his roommate’s girlfriend, a dancer who saw how Anderson worked the floor at a party, invited him to one of her dance classes.
Suddenly, the aspiring engineer’s life became as fluid as his dancing.
“Choreography is what drew me into dance,” says the Richmond, Va., native, who ended up graduating from Cornell with a bachelor’s in choreography and performance. “It’s the idea of being able to say things through my own body and my own work. Ironically, that idea was kind of what drew me into engineering in the first place, so my imagination has sort of been pushing me all along.”