Fall for Dance: I Fell for Ambiguity
The image was taken from: <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/arts/dance/30fall.html?_r=1>
As the curtain was pulled away, two expressionless dancers in white unitard started dancing on the empty stage without music in Fall For Dance. As the light got brighter, the heavy metallic noises and ambiguous mumbles were coated on the dancers’ slow motions. XOVER started. There was neither rhythm nor liaison. When a group of identical looking dancers came out on the stage, a single word came across my mind: “momentum.” I couldn’t understand why this clumsy and distasteful word, which retrieved the forgotten memories of my hateful high school physics class, kept entering my head while I was watching the modern dance performance.
The description of XOVER on the program booklet was “the final reunion of the “original collaborators”- Cunningham, Cage, and Rauschenberg- bringing together a beautiful assemblage of their individual mediums.” Certainly those three directors’ components were put together and lively appearing on the stage: Cunningham’s choreography, Cage’s music, and Rauschenberg’s décor and costume. What else was needed ? However, the entire performance was like gobbling a whole pie of greasy pizza without drinking a sip of soda. There were too many things, so I couldn’t digest them all at once. All I needed was the moment that I could feel a sense of union, harmony, and ensemble. I didn’t feel like all three components were equally emphasized. When one component was strong, the other one was stronger.
As the performance was drawing to an end, I could finally understand why that clumsy physics word kept blinking above my head. Each individual dancer’s uniqueness was entirely eradicated. Without showing any sense of emotion, they were jumping up and down, flying over each other. Doing all those intricate acrobatic movements with their expressionless faces made me to question what they were dancing for. Are they enjoying their own performance? In my eyes, they were simply turning round and round, hand in hand rather than dancing. I could not see any attempt of communication between the dancers nor between the dancers and audiences. I had no idea whether they were actually understanding and interpreting the director’s intention or just doing it because they were asked to do so.
Let me put it into a simpler form: I felt like I was observing a massive atomic collision through a microscope. Since each dancer’s individuality was lost and his potentials were locked, I could see him as a hardened atom with heavy momentum rather than a dance performer. Such collision was eventually sublimated into an unidentified juxtaposition of harsh noises as musical accompaniment. It was ironic that the background painting, originally drawn by Rauschenberg, resembled a stop sign and bar in front of the train rails. Without reviving each dancer’s individuality, this performance would go on and on without having a definite end. Overall, it was a certainly something radically new, yet not enough to be a revolution.
