Political Mother.  Quite an unusual name if you ask me.  Then again, the entire performance was quite unusual.  Upon entering the theater, you enter a dense cloud of smoke that spreads throughout the whole building.  Your visibility is limited and it feels like you’re in a monster movie in the scene before the monster appears.  The auditorium is somewhat dark and we take our seats.

            The theater suddenly becomes pitch black and a single spot light appears.  A samurai draws out his sword and the audience becomes silent and their attention is locked onto the lone samurai.  Nobody could have predicted what was going to happen next.  Seppuku, the Japanese ritual of suicide by disembowelment.  The audience was transfixed upon the writhing samurai.

The stage went dark again and the music began to play.  The music changed abruptly from a calm and serene tune to a rock hard score.  Another spotlight turned on and this time there were two dancers on stage.  With the music blaring, the audience anxiously awaited for the dancers to begin.  The two dancers performed some rather unusual movements and the spotlight dimmed again.

When the spotlight turned on again there was a group of dancers.  What was interesting about the way the group danced was the unpredictability of it.  Usually performances have a strict rhythm and pattern of movement.  However, this was different.  At certain times the group would dance together.  At specific moments a dancer or a few dancers would break apart from the group and perform their own movements.  Amazingly both sets of dancing would seem inharmonious with each other but they would come together in the end both literally and figuratively.

The music was also done live by guitarists and drummers that were hidden in the darkness backstage.  They would occasionally be brought to light by the spotlight and seen by the audience.  The changes in music from a peaceful melody to a rock score and back constantly kept the audience hypnotized.  Various dance moves were seen though out the entire performance, and one was even brought up in class by my professor.

The title of the performance was Political Mother.  During the whole performance, the audience members were trying to connect the performance to the title.  Out of the darkness came the words, “Where there is pressure, there is-”  The audience anxiously awaited the final word as they were trying to figure it out themselves like a game of Wheel of Fortune.  I admit I thought the word would be revolution.

The word turned out to be, “folkdance.”  I certainly wasn’t expecting that.  All in all, Political Mother was an excellent performance that grabbed your attention from the very beginning and held it until the end.

 

One Response to Political? Mother

  1. Jonathan Chevinsky says:

    I find it very interesting how in your discussion of the dancers and the arrangement of the dance itself you characterized it as unpredictable given the fact that individual dancers would frequently split off from the main group and rejoin, if not whole groups separating during the performance. While I agree that the style of dance itself was unpredictable and relatively unfounded in dance that I have experienced in the past, to me the concept of groups dividing and performing alongside each other seems neither foreign nor particularly astounding; what made this performance unique to me was more the dance itself than the arrangement in which it was performed. When it comes to your characterization of the music, however, I feel that you really hit the nail on the head in your assessment of the fact that it had a hypnotizing effect, but I feel that this was more achieved during the periods of extended rock music throughout much of the performance rather than the transitions between musical styles themselves.

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