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Fall for Dance City Center

mrajshahiwala

Miami City Ballet, Vincent Mantsoe, Trisha Brown Company and Dorrance Dance Company; that was the order of the program. The order of the dance pieces symbolized the message behind the program, this desire to detach from mainstream society and value what is different and real.

When looking at the order, I realized the first piece juxtaposed the second and the third piece juxtaposed the fourth. However, the third piece’s placement really connected with me and I am going to focus on that in my analysis.

When I initially reflected on the program after I got home, the Dorrance Dance Company piece was the most memorable due to its interesting music and incredible choreography. However, when I began to analyze the program as a whole, the Trisha Brown number kept bothering me, as if I couldn’t figure something out about it.

It was an eerie piece. The red light engulfed the dancers, giving them a warm but alien look. The off-sync imitation led the audience to highlight the other differences between the dancers, like the differences in haircuts and heights. It was as if Trisha Brown was trying her best to make the dancers seem like the same people, but they weren’t, and that was the important thing. Her off-sync imitation choreography spoke volumes to the message she was conveying to the audience. She gave commentary about the forced conformism that society mandates on people.  However, humans are not dolls that can be made to look alike. We all have individual beliefs and traits that make us unique. Therefore, Trisha Brown chose for them to have different haircuts and overall body types, to make obvious the differences they possessed and highlight their individuality. This is made further evident with the Dorrance Dance Company piece following the Trisha Brown piece. The Dorrance Dance Company piece was diverse from the get-go. It had no uniformity in costumes or dancers with spoke to the almost utopian goal of this program. It was as if the Trisha Brown piece was reality and the Dorrance Dance piece was a hopeful future. In the wake of this political atmosphere, the overall program was a refreshing reprieve and proved that though we are all different, we stand together.

Reality vs Expectation

eitanarm

Reality vs Expectations

  1. “For Fermi felt two underwent two shocks that day. The first was on seeing the power of the blast, and the second was on meeting an undiscovered part of himself.”
  2. “If you deny that part of yourself in order to feel more whole, than you might as well be a different person.
  3. Griffin’s quote is a small bit of her radiation sorry. She refers to when Enrico Fermi felt the true power and devastation of nuclear weapons when he helped create the first atom bomb. That despite not even hearing the blast, the magnitude and aftermath of it rattled him. He became more paranoid, more worried about the cruel world, and what it can accomplish.
  4. Expectations can be wildly different from reality. Humans thrive on being able to predict the situations they’re in and be able to solve them. However, they can’t handle if expectations differ from reality. Humans have always feared the unknown. They built their society in a way where they don’t have to experience the hardships of mystery. Unfortunately, this gave birth to the expression, ignorance is bliss? But is it really?

Story Map: “Just Kids: Patti Smith’s New York”

Alexis Carrozza

Here is the Story Map that was shown in class on Tuesday, October 17. I had a lot of fun putting this together: Story Map is pretty easy to use and it really helped me visualize the events described in Just Kids. Story Map definitely will come in handy in your other MHC seminars so try it out or make an appointment for ITF office hours and we can learn together!

Look, Look Again

Asma Awad

Look, Look Again: Web of Life, John Biggers

What initially drew me to this painting was the actual length compared to the width. It was more of a rectangular shape, a particularly long one at that, compared to the other square framed paintings. The second aspect of the painting itself that struck me was the center, a breast-feeding woman. She appeared to be the main focus of the painting, the other facets branching off of her. She also seemed to act as a divider between the left and right sides of the art, which were as different as could be. The contrast between the sides was clear, but the number of factors that contributed to this contrast was more hidden. The left side portrayed a winter night, characterized by cooler colors and a melancholy aura. It also showed women, standing in a strict formation, carrying what appears to be baskets of crops. The right side, on the other hand, was completely different in both these aspects. It displays a spring day, fruitful with life such as the fish and flowering trees. Rather than women, the right side depicted men engaging in agricultural work, in a more scattered fashion. Taking note of all this, I began to attempt to piece the art together in order to understand how these features connected.

Because the piece is titled “Web of Life,” I assumed Biggers was showing viewers a prevalent interconnectedness in life. The men on the right side of the painting could be sowing seeds, as growers do in spring, and thereby introducing life- literally, through plants growing or metaphorically, through crops used as food. The women on the left side, however, could be harvesting what had been grown, returning the land to its barren state. I believe the winter and spring scenes contributed to implying that the right side of the painting symbolized growth and the left side represented death. The woman breast-feeding in the center of the painting is shown underneath the ground, possibly showing how once people are born, they factor into the system of life and death.

Fall for Dance: The Trisha Brown Dance Company

Teresa Wrobleski
Trisha Brown

The Trisha Brown Dance Company was founded in 1970 by it’s owner and main choreographer, Trisha Brown. Brown was already well-known for her experimental pieces in the 1960s in what were called “equipment prices” where dancers used items such as harnesses and wires to simulate walking in mid-air. This type of postmodern dance became her trademark though she regularly changed the themes and methods of how she danced and choreographed others.

In the 1980s, she began to create large-scale pieces that were intended to be performed onstage, as opposed to some of her previous on-location pieces. She collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg for costumes and sets on may of her most well-known works of this period, such as Astral Convertible. Other collaborators of this time included Laurie Anderson, Nancy Graves, and Donald Judd.

During this time period, Brown solidified her position as as innovative choreographer and a major contributor to the world of postmodern dance. Trish Brown passed away in March 2017, but her company survives to perform her pieces to this day.

Fall for Dance Review: Individuals vs. Groups

makeshabalkaran

Individual/ Group Dances Observation

With widened eyes and hands that cannot seem to cease clapping, this night is one that I surely will never forget. Now, looking back, I wondered, “well…how different could a group dance be versus an individual dance, it must carry the same story, the same feel, just a different amount of dancers, right?” Boy, was I wrong!

The two primary groups that stood out in terms of this distinction between the group and the individual were The Miami Ballet and Dorrance Dance Company. Two extremes of the world of dance as considered today. The Miami Ballet provided a classical and gentle take on dance, connecting music with movement precisely. However, the Dorrance Dance Company portrayed modern tap dancing, with dynamic and eccentric dances clashing and melocially adding to music, intertwining with it through the means of dance and movement.

Funny enough, each group attracted me for the opposite reason!

The Miami Ballet was overall delicate; the music and movement portrayed a traditional method of storytelling through dance. The groups tended to be more whimsical, prancing around the stage, the men with happy smiles on their faces, lively and joyous they were. My favorite however, were the individuals. The individual ballerina, the sole duos, they told a different story. They were solemn and somewhat acrobatic. This amazing sense of emotion flowed through their limbs as they danced. Nevertheless, developing this pattern of dance: quirky traditional ballet followed by melancholy and encapturing ballet.

Contrastingly, the Dorrance Dance company portrayed this dynamic street-style dance.Each individual portrayed their own personality while meshing together as a whole. The movements of the groups were rather in sync and spectacularly choreographed. They nonetheless exhibited feeling and mood as a group without muddling. They mirror in movement and use their bodies in magnificent ways to create incredible free-form movements. On the other hand, duos and solos as the individual portion, stood out from the group to tell their own stories, with their own set of emotions. Solo movements intertwined with one another and carried distinct individualism from the group. not to mention, the solos portrayed darker/heavier feelings than the happiness/lightness of the group dance, along with sharper almost “spazzing” movement.Thus, the group dances in this case turned out to be my favorite portions of the performance due to the incredible synergy and happiness/freedom they evoked. 

All in all, the performances not only opened my eyes to the uniquely beautiful movements of the dancers, but to dance in general. Dance itself is such an art, from the emotions of the individual to the cooperation of a group, dance is not JUST a collection of choreographed pieces. Dance is feeling, dance is unique, and dance surely is something to Fall For.