Dance Review (Courtney)

 To review the dance performance of IU Dance Theatre's 85th Anniversary Gala I would like to focus on the piece I felt was the most focused and successful of the four pieces, Paul Taylor’s “Esplanade.” This piece succeeded in the way in which it suggested and explored numerous dance themes. 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. 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.

Once the dancers begin running diagonally across the stage it becomes easy to let go of preconceptions of what dance should be, and the distinctions between formal and informal movements. The sheer beauty of a body running rapidly transforms the meaning of “I could do that myself” from the exclusion of both viewer and dancer from claims to artistry to the thrilling welcoming of both viewer and artist toward claims of artistry. Movement here is the key, and every movement has its own beauty, even the “failed” movements of falling and tripping. Perhaps one of the few viewers excluded from this reconfiguration of “I could do that myself” is the entirely immobile one, yet, even then, the argument could be made for the beauty expressed in the act of being carried, for, in the dance, bodily interaction is not always about movement. In this piece dance is about the many different ways a body can move and interact with other bodies more than it is about a each particular dancer’s virtuosity.