Blog 19.2 (Ming)

Annnnd I thought this was due at midnight.  Anyway:

True: 

Derek- At the end of the piece, after Mr. Musiel’s character held the wrists of Miss Hazelwood’s character and shook her arms, they went round in circles pushing to spin the mattress before finally Miss Hazelwood had enough, up-ending the mattress into Mr. Musiel’s face, metaphorically slamming the door, which she then turned her back on and stalked resolutely chin-up off the stage.

Kelly- I’m not a dance person. I’m often the last to dance at parties and it is often after several drinks. I, also, don’t respond to dance very well. I’ve been to dance concerts and friend’s ballets and I’ve tried to get it, but I just can’t.

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

Cody- 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. 

Justin- the ‘soldiers’ performed the training/disciplining of their individual bodies, their most basic possessions, so as to become a seamlessly working unit – ultimately, their bodies were no longer their own, but belonged to each other and to the state...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- the dancers created some beautiful images through which I was constantly interpreting and reinterpreting the story.

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. 

Meaningful: Derek- The dancers engaged in domino tag, touch-falling and rising, leaping into the air, and I could not help smiling in pleasure at the joy they exhibited. 

Jess- When performers land on their feet or bodies in a forceful way, my bones feel like I've stuck a fork in a toaster. 

Andrea- 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. 

Justin- Is the ‘bodymind’ a performance muscle that can be trained by the scholar as well?

Iris- 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...

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. 

True and meaningful: Jennifer- The dancers emphasized their shoulder blades and collapsed their cores, dragging themselves to center stage where they revolved in a starving, circling herd....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. 

Coutrney-  These informal movements urge the question “Is walking dance?” 

Jess- In the end, I found truth to be located in each dancer's body, the meaningful in the narrative, and the subjective in the designs.

Andrea- Much of the pleasure or enjoyment of watching was about puzzling out the story and the characters.

Cody- 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.

Dorothy- What are these dances trying to tell us?