MCI graduate will dance at Oscar event

PITTSFIELD – There will be a little bit of Maine dancing around the stage later this month when Bossov Ballet graduate Molly Gawler performs during the Academy Awards in Hollywood.

Gawler, who graduated from the Bossov program at Maine Central Institute in 2003, is a senior at State University of New York at Purchase.

Reared in a musical, performing family in Belgrade, Gawler sings, dances and plays the fiddle and banjo.

But it will be her dancing that will take center stage at the Oscars as she performs with Pilobolus, a renowned Connecticut dance troupe.

Television audiences likely already have seen Gawler in action as one of a group of bodies that shape themselves into items, including a seesaw and a car, in a Hyundai commercial.

“She is the one that comes out of the top of the mountain and the one on the left of the seesaw, and the one that blows out the fire,” her mother, Ellen Gawler of Belgrade, said Sunday. Molly Gawler could not be reached.

“We are so excited,” she said. “The whole family is going to Railroad Square [Cinema in Waterville] to watch the Oscars.” The Oscar broadcast on ABC will begin at 8 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 25.

The Gawler family is a well-known Maine entertainment group, performing traditional folk music at concerts and fairs.

The group consists of Molly, her two sisters, Edith, 19, and Elsie, 17, and their parents, Ellen and John.

Molly Gawler is a 2003 graduate of MCI who studied ballet for four years under Andre Bossov as part of her curriculum.

Gawler is now a senior at SUNY Purchase, just north of New York City. She was one of 150 dancers who auditioned for Pilobolus and one of only two selected. She has been teaching workshops and classes for the troupe.

When members of the Academy Awards production team saw the Hyundai commercial, they made a call to Pilobolus.

Nine dancers will perform nine pieces for the Oscars. “They will all perform in shadow,” Ellen Gawler said.