- Dancers of all different body types were featured.
- Some of the pieces had visually interesting choreography.
That's all I can come up with. The performance opened with a piece by an alumna choreographer. An all-female ensemble with skintight black pants and tank tops in varying but mostly drab colors performed various moves better known as warmup moves, but performed half-heartedly and with angst. Seeing women hunched over in pike stretch, or kneeling and tapping their hands boredly, or doing half planks or small jumps made me assume the choreographer was portraying how I warm up when I'm grumpy and tired. This would have been entertaining if performed as a comedy.
At least one of the dancers started adjusting her costume while not far enough into the wings to be invisible to the audience. Bad form. While I'm on the topic, I'm willing to overlook most of the technique issues; these are beginning dancers, most first year students at the college. I'm not so willing to overlook poor stage manners and presence. At least none of them looked terrified, but when they were done with a move or headed off stage, the dancers had a tendency to slouch, if they weren't doing so already. Overall, even for beginners, they seemed to lack a commitment to what they were doing on stage.
On to the next piece, which I really wanted to like because the choreographer worked with the Atlanta Ballet. It was visually interesting. The costumes were still drab (seriously, my nail polish was more sparkly than anything I saw on the stage, and that sparkly nail polish hadn't congealed after two years while I was in Tanzania, which makes me assume it contains something toxic and likely to shorten my lifespan considerably), tank tops and bike shorts, and the three dancers, two men, one women, did nothing to challenge the idea that the purpose of men in dance is to lift women. Seriously, isn't modern dance supposed to break rules and expectations?
Whatever. On to lots of female dancers in white dresses, high waisted, with sleeves improperly cut so that the entire dress had to move everytime they raised their arms, and at least the skirts wore short enough to reveal plain white bloomers. Couldn't they even have pretty bloomers? With lace? The male dancer was wearing trousers of a dirty brown color, with a dirty looking white shirt, untucked and half unbuttoned. The choreography was a wandering unfocused mess, but the dancers seemed to like it better than their previous material. I think because it was country-ish music about love. Some of them even smiled.
Continuing the momentum of engagement by the dancers, they engaged in the only good piece in the production, choreographed by Carol Mendes. Performed only by women in shiny black and white dresses with cut outs in the back so they could move their arms freely. Of course, this revealed bra straps (who told these women to wear bras with transparent plastic straps on stage? The plastic catches the stage lights and glitters. Underwear should match either skin or costume.), but it was an improvement. The movements matched the music, it was happy, and the dancers smiled and engaged with their audience. I call that a win, even though a major moment of the piece was the dancers pulling up their dresses and smiling as they revealed their bright pastel-colored bike shorts.
It was a short-lived win, since an artsy short film was up next.
As the dance world continues to evolve and incorporate digital media, I am happy to say that Western will be premiering a short dance film. ~Note from the artistic director in the program.
Digital: it does not mean what you seem to think it means. A film is not necessarily digital, and the dance world has been incorporating digital media pretty much since the invention of the CD. Technical language quibbles aside, the premiered short film was horrible. Not only did it continue the choreographic pattern of modern dance without any particular point, it was actively annoying. It opened with two mouths close together loudly pronouncing "oh" and "ah" in alternation. It continued to show people arranged on the floor to spell "oh" and "ah" in case we weren't getting the point from the music. The ohs and ahs continued loudly throughout not pretty shots of the campus (which is sad, the campus is quite pretty) with people either dancing not prettily through hallways, or body parts way too close too close to the cameras for anything but marveling about how ugly skin is in high enough resolution.
After the terrible film, all the dancers performed, following the narrated stage directions in the music (so cliche) while in skintight bodysuits without adequate lining. I wanted to hulk into one of my dance teachers and smash things with my righteous fists of costuming fury. Then the women of the ensemble began angstily grabbing their breasts. Suddenly I stopped blaming the dancers for not seeming committed to the choreography and began sympathizing.
After a brief break for the dancers to get out of their ill-lined body suits and back into something slightly less horrid, which meant black bike shorts with skintight black tank tops (for the men) and poorly fitting corset-style shirts in a noticeably different shade of black from the shorts and held on with what looked like white elastic straps (for the women), the ensemble proceeded to perform a second visually interesting piece. I still didn't understand what the dance was supposed to communicate, and it was still overly angsty, and it was still the same look and style of modern dance as the rest of the production, but at least it was moderately better than what came before, so ending with that will work.
Insofar as I understand modern dance, which is at least moreso than I understand modern visual art, it is supposed to be transgressive against rules and structures such that new forms of dance become possible. When structure is banished only for the sake of banishing structure without bringing anything new, we are left with an incomprehensible message and bored. Why does it have to be all modern dance anyway? Adding basic pieces of other dance styles would give the students a better education in dance and lead to a more varied dance production.
I'm going to be teaching beginning belly dance at the college next semester. Now I'm worried that I will be as bad an influence on dance here as what the college is already subject to.
No comments:
Post a Comment