Onstage, underneath lights and in costume, Hazal Gurcan uses dance and the movement of her body to impart emotion to her audience. Offstage, she utilizes languages to connect with others.

“I really like communicating with people, and I think learning languages helps you communicate more openly with people,” she said. “A lot of times, when there’s a language barrier, it’s really hard to fully express what you’re trying to say.”

Raised in a bilingual, multicultural household, Hazal experienced the joy of communicating with her relatives in her native language.

“I grew up speaking Turkish, and I really like figuring out what things mean in different languages,” she said. “Unless you speak a language well, you can’t really understand an idiom or something like that because you think about things literally.”

Hazal is fluent in English and Turkish and conversant in French, Japanese, and Spanish. In recent years, she delved into French by participating in an immersion program.

“I went to Switzerland for a summer language program, and there, it was really cool because there were people from all around the world,” she said. “There were people from Saudi Arabia, there were people from Serbia, Venezuela, United States, China, Japan, Russia, from everywhere. You name a country, there was probably someone from there there. We all ended up talking and learning a little bit of each other’s languages. It was nice being able to communicate, like the people who were France, I was able to speak to them in French, and it was like actually being able to talk to them, whereas if I talked to them in English, it was harder for them to understand what I was saying.”

This past summer, Hazal delved into yet another language: Japanese.

“I feel like I’m always going out of my comfort zone a lot of the time,” she said. “I’ve never taken Japanese; I’ve never studied a language that’s similar to Japanese because I take French, and I speak Turkish.”

Hazal has a myriad of other interests besides languages, from dance to gymnastics to flute and piano.

“My parents, when I was really little, signed me up for everything imaginable,” she said. “I guess I’ve always been busy. I can’t remember a time I wasn’t doing something.”

Currently, Hazal practices dance daily and coaches rhythmic gymnastics. She narrowed her extensive activity list down by deciding which ones she loved most.

“I guess what I learned is that you don’t have to be the best at everything because that’s impossible, obviously. You have to follow what you like a lot. When I was in soccer—I did competitive soccer a couple years in middle school—I was the goalie, and I started in sixth grade and I somehow made it onto a competitive outside team, so I was decently good. If I had continued, I probably would have gone on to play pretty advanced soccer, but I didn’t love it as much as I loved doing other things, and even though I was pretty good at that, I didn’t enjoy it, and that wasn’t fun for me.”

Through trial and error, and experience after experience, Hazal found her love for communicating universally with both her body and her words.