19.2 - Culled Responses (Derek)

(I thought the due date/time was today at midnight. My apologies for the late post. - Derek)

I pulled passages that I thought were interesting and fit into the three categories of true, meaningful, or both. I've organized them that way here.

True

Courtney (on Esplanade) – Set to Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major, the dance sets up its contrasts from the very beginning. Against this most classical of classical music, the dancers walk in patterned movements around the stage, pairing and unpairing in turn.

Andrea – In the non-narrative dances, I noticed myself responding more physically to the performance. Through most of Esplanade and Nascimento, my enjoyment came from the physicality of the dancers as they moved and the joy that they seemed to have in their own movement. They were often smiling as they ran or jumped or spun onstage, and I felt my face become more lifted as well, raising my eyebrows and lips slightly. I kept finding that my leg muscles, especially my calves, were slightly flexed as I watched, and when the music had a strong beat, I tapped my toes in my shoes. At their best moments, these dances conveyed a kind of exuberance in movement that I somehow experienced with them.

Cody – the dances presented themselves as possessing a large degree of narrativity.  The first and fourth dances were broken into scenes.  The first dance titularly situates its dancers within a phantasmatic space (the esplanade).  The second dance is intertextually based off of two different ballets (The Rite of Spring and Giselle), both of which have well-known narrative trajectories.  The third dance also situtates the staged movements within a specific space (the bedroom), using a maitress as indicative of such locality.  While none of the latter definitively demarcates these performaces as finite, comprehensible narratives, each dance possessed markers of narrativity, of diegetic progression, of conflict(s), etc. that pulled me into this game of narrative interpretation. 

Meaningful

Jennifer – I ended up reading Evans’ work as one in which the performers wracked their bodies against a female-enforced patriarchy. The titular reference to a rite was evident in the shortened wedding dresses of the bride figures. Their gestural attempts to coerce and impose conformity on the female dancer in the simpler dress were intentionally redundant/stuplimitous: a big, circular gesture reminiscent of stirring a vat followed by a flattened, raised hand as though they were looking in vanity mirrors. The Rousseau figure’s eventual triumph – her rejection of the brides – was evident in the contrast between her previously jerky, seizing movement and her graceful, dismissive exit stage left, leaving the brides to twitch on the floor.

Courtney (on Esplanade) – These informal movements urge the question “Is walking dance?” and hint at what Reason and Reynolds call the “clichéd response to modern art, ‘I could do that myself’” (“Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures,” 59). Decentering the significance of the dancers’ skills and physical virtuosity, Taylor choreographs a dance that is about movement itself and the beauty of “everyday” movements.

Jess – Every time I see feats of physical prowess and athletic ability, I feel a kinesthetic response that I place somewhere in the area of longing. Though I've taken some modern dance classes (and loved them), I have never been very athletic. When I see dance, there is a part of me that yearns to do what they do, because to me, dance is almost more important to the performer than the observer. It's such a joyous, ecstatic thing, to be moving the body in these increasingly difficult, yet emotionally explosive patterns, and absolute passion showed in every one of the performers' bodies.

Kelly – These are the questions that I was having throughout the concert: Is there a narrative? Why are the girls in dresses and the boys in pants? Why is that one girl in pants? Why are the pairings only boy/girl I was hung up on what the dance was NOT rather than what it was.

Whitney (on Rite of Summer) – this piece laid out a narrative more effectively than the others. Through movement, music, costuming, and a small blurb in the program, there was a very clear (almost too clear) story being conveyed for the audience.

Dorothy – The running, however, brings up a question that had reoccurring strains throughout each piece. What is dance? If running is dance, than is it dance to walk, is it dance to sit up and look chagrined (as in Straight Duet)? To paraphrase John Blacking, I think dance in these modern contexts can be defined as “humanly organized movement,” and feel most engaged by the movements that are not necessarily traditional in the canon of pre-modern Western dance.

BOTH

Whitney (on Rite of Summer) – The dancers displayed extraordinary control over their bodies through muscle isolations and staccato movements that countered a narrative of complete absence of control. There were several other, collective moments of grotesque movement that worked against the general gracefulness of these women’s bodies. At one point, the dancers crawled along the ground on their elbows en masse – dragging both their temporarily paralyzed bodies and their white dresses over the black floor, a moment that actually prompted a grimace.

Justin – The performances of “Esplanade” and “Nascimento Novo” at IU Dance Theatre’s Celebration Gala evoked this same idea. Throughout, I envisioned the internal challenge for the dancers: “This is my run, yet it is your run. This is my jump, yet it’s yours as well. This is my arm extension, yet it is our [the whole group’s] same extension.” The individual is erased, as each member works to embody the same steps and to mirror the rest of the group. This was most evident in “Esplanade” as pairs, trios, and the entire group were challenged to crawl, skip, run or leap in unison. Likewise, moments of differentiated movements called body ownership into question, as they were typified by the sharing of weight and absolute trust in another’s physical strength. “It is my head-first leap, but your ‘catch’ that keeps me whole.”

Iris – I noticed that my behavior as a dance spectator was different from when I go to see plays. When watching theatre, I laugh, loudly and often, because I feel that it's appropriate and I want the actors to know I'm enjoying myself. But there was a point in "Esplanade" when one of the dancers went running across the stage on a diagonal, with an enormous smile on her face. I burst out laughing, and immediately covered my mouth, embarrassed. It was okay to make quiet, appreciative noises, during an especially impressive physical feat, but I felt that laughter would in some way ruin the moment.

Sara – An esplanade is a large outdoor place for walking and indeed Taylor’s choreography is pedestrian in the sense that it refuses the formal, prescribed gestures of classical dance while still capturing the exuberant poetry-in-motion of the everyday joys of being out and about in the air. I was particularly struck by the irreverence of the movement in contrast to the motivic structure of Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto in D minor for Two Violins. At first, I was unable to see the expansion or repetition of a dance idea that might coalesce with the music, but in continuing to watch, I began to pick out the lovely return time and again of the solo women—I’m thinking the first, dynamic entrance by the lone female figure, and the delightful image of the small girl bouncing—leaping—bounding? over the line of prostrate dancers.