The top ten Valentine’s Day pick-up lines as submitted by the staff of the NOVA Fortnightly.

A Centreville-based band is set to hit the airwaves and the local music clubs this spring. Their music, a fusion of piano and violin instrumentals set to an electronica backdrop, challenges its audience to redefine rock music.

The Black Cat is filled with admiring fans, and the two-member ensemble with a flair for the theatrics captured their hearts and pulled in their attention to the musical spectacle. Alex Gioeli, 19, has always dreamed for this scene to come to fruition. Turn a pedestrian gaze at Gioeli and see nothing out of the seemingly mundane college sophomore. Open an inquiring eye and see a passionate and ambitious musician looking to make it big one day.

“My dreams are a very active part of my life,” Annandale English instructor Raymond Orkwis said, right after stressing the importance of strict realism in life-planning essays. Orkwis’ outlet for those dreams is poetry, occasionally published, sometimes heard in coffee-houses, and usually, as he says, “surreal.”

For the actors and crew of the Nova Woodbridge Theatre Group, Arthur Miller’s 1947 classic, All My Sons, is a work in progress. They had only reached their third rehearsal as of September 17, so the actors, with scripts still in hand, performed in a phase between reading and acting, moving through an approximation of what will, in mid-November, be the final set.
Professor Eric Trumbull, who teaches acting and theatre workshops at Nova Woodbridge, gave them time to get used to the words and the play, all the while …

At NOVA’s Loudoun campus, student-based theater and community theater have combined for a modernized version of John Guare’s 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation. The play centers around the way a gay con man — who is also a sensitive, moving speaker — affects the wealthy Kittredge family in New York.

Five! Six! Five, six, seven, eight! When I walked into the dance studio, at the Alexandria campus, I felt a surge of intensity come over me. There stood Kathy Harty Gray, wearing all black, hair pulled back in a low ponytail, clapping with vigorous rhythm. Every move, bend, kick and flex came so naturally to her — she had been dancing since childhood. The girls seemed to mirror her unconsciously.

Gray’s love for dance shows in the lightness in her footwork. Her graceful movements are illustrated the moment she steps foot in a dance studio.