Thursday, November 8, 2012

Blog 19 Pt. 2 Dorothy

TRUE

Ming
  I thought of the various lenses that could be used during tonight's performance: as clearly the top-billed dancer up there, Lalah Hazelwood perhaps drew people who came to see her in something. They might compare her performance tonight with seeing her in other things, perhaps at other ages—other Lalahs from other times, littler Lalahs from other years. For those people, various other Lalahs come into the “room”--the space of the mind of the viewer.

Jess
 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

Whitney
  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...The patterns of movement imitation between the shadow brides and the young virgin felt eerie and dystopic.

Cody
  However, putting theory into practice, in my case, presented a different outcome.  Rather than enjoying the dynamism of the dancers’ bodies, I found myself questioning how these specific movements related to the overall narratives of the dances.  Perhaps this reaction is merely symptomatic of myself being pedantically cerebral and not being in tuned with my emotions.  

Justin
 We have been discussing kinesthetic empathy and the connection between critical and emotional intellects as they relate to spectators. How can a viewer’s thoughts and feelings be attended to simultaneously? The answer may lie in the dancers’ ability to simultaneously perform their own physical movements yet have an external focus that allows for a faultless connection to another or group. Such simultaneous attention to external stimuli and internal response may be attributed to use of what critics have termed the ‘bodymind,’ a tool that Phillip Zarrilli has discussed concerning the purposeful training of actors

MEANINGFUL

Courtney
 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)

Jennifer
I was particularly affected by the juxtaposition of joy and misery throughout the evening’s performances. For example, the opening was joyous: happy bodies frolicking across and around the stage in what appeared to be an updated quadrille. The second movement was a sudden change – an exploration of destructive isolation. The dancers reached, but their inability to actually touch each other was painful to watch. The dancers emphasized their shoulder blades and collapsed their cores, dragging themselves to center stage where they revolved in a starving, circling herd.  

Derek

The final song had some English lyrics, “gathering together”, and featured rhythmic clapping by the dancers, which made me want to clap along with them. [bold added]

Kelley
  There were definite moments when I felt the dancers celebrated their bodies and lengthened their legs and balanced and yes, it was beautiful. But the moments I loved were the moments, like in the first dance, when the dancers came on crawling on all fours in a grotesque way, an evil way.

Andrea
  There were two types of dance performances at the Gala last Sunday—those that were based in a narrative and those that were not (or were less so).

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

Sara
  By eschewing narrative and formal abstraction for embodied exuberance and the aesthetic of the everyday, it was Taylor’s work that created a space for the subsequent pieces we witnessed. There is no beauty much less propriety in the tumble on the mattress without first witnessing the beauty in the walk for the bus.

Jenna
   After the exercise of recognizing the dance alums and current students of dance in the audience, I clearly felt my position in the audience as one of interloper. Even though the audience was of such a significant size that I doubt all of the people gathered there were associated with the dance program, so many of the viewers immediately surrounding my seat stood for recognition when prompted that I felt lost in the sea of expert dance spectators.

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