For the first time in 10 years, the Dance Company will perform to live music in the AACC Symphony Orchestra’s spring concert.

The orchestra’s concert is titled “A Mother’s Day Tribute,” as it will show on May 12, Mother’s Day, in the Kauffman Theater.

The Dance Company will perform while the orchestra plays Danzón No. 7, a musical piece designed specifically for dancing.

Margaret Russell, the Dance Company’s director, said dancing to live music is a “special treat that not all dancers get to do.”

“It’s such a great opportunity for dancers to perform alongside other artists and with live music,” Russell said. “It makes the dancers appreciate the other artists in the room, you know, the musicians.”

Orchestra conductor Anna Binneweg said the show will be a “nice, collaborative, departmental event.”

“It’s always great any time you can put performing arts together in different mediums,” Binneweg said. “It’s nice; nice for the audience, nice for the orchestra.”

The performance is a tribute to Mother’s Day, so the pieces the orchestra plays will “relate to or be inspired by” mothers and motherhood, such as Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, according to Binneweg.

Russell added that performing to live music makes the dancers “smarter.”

“You really have to, like, listen to what’s going on,” Russell said. “[The musicians] are human beings. They’re not a recording, you know, so it keeps it fresh.”

The Dance Company will also perform its own, separate show on May 3 and 4 in the Kauffman Theater.

Russell said the show will be a mix of ballet, lyrical, contemporary and hip hop.

“No matter what you like, we’ll have it,” Russell said.

Russell said the show’s name, “Elevation,” is “a little bit of a play on words.”

“[It’s] raising the bar for the dancers and pushing them to their boundaries and lifting them up when they need to be lifted up, but also, like, there’s a lot of lifts and jumps,” Russell said.