Thursday, November 8, 2012

Dance Performance Review Crowd-Sourcing (19.2 - Whitney)


**Apologies for the slight tardiness of this post.

TRUE: I’m attempting to cull quotes from my peers that construct “true” in terms of brutal honest. The moments within these reviews that seemed to unexpectedly reveal an honest statement about the reviewer that maybe otherwise wouldn’t have been revealed. Things about ourselves that we discovered or were forced to discover because of the experience of the dance performance.

Kelly: “Perhaps there is this joy I find in bodies that celebrate how ugly/disturbing they can become rather than pleasing to the eye.”

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.”

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.  Perhaps this reaction is merely symptomatic of myself being pedantically cerebral and not being in tuned with my emotions.”

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, and immediately covered my mouth, embarrassed.”

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.”

MEANINGFUL: The quotes I’m pulling here focus less on the reviewer and more on unexpected and thought-provoking elements of the dance performance that emerged from the reviews. The “meaningful” works on a deeper level of analysis than the surface of the dance performance itself allowed for – the not-so-obvious trajectories of feeling and analysis that it prompted, thinking beyond dance as simply the movement of bodies in space.

Courtney: “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.”

Courtney: “Perhaps one of the few viewers excluded from this reconfiguration of “I could do that myself” is the entirely immobile one…”

Justin: “…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.”

Sara: “There is no beauty much less propriety in the tumble on the mattress without first witnessing the beauty in the walk for the bus.”

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