Fall for Dance

Fall For Dance: Dorrance Dance Company

seherakram

Background 

  • Founded by Michelle Dorrance
  • The daughter of a nationally acclaimed soccer coach and ballet dancer.
  • Started tap at the age of nine.
  • Completed her BA at NYU, and won the MacArthur fellowship shortly after (awarded to 15-30 individuals.)
  • In 2010 she founded her own company- Dorrance Dance Company.

Dorrance vs. Classic 

Photo: Google

Classic Tap Dance

  • Very neutral expressions
  • Little to no upper body movement
  • Very stiff and uniform dance form

Dorrance Dance 

  • Extensive upper body movements
  • Wide array of facial expressions
  • Diverse costumes

Fall For Dance: Lighting

Asma Awad

The Fall For Dance was an incredible experience- it portrayed different types of dances, each with their own distinguished movements, music, and lighting. Lighting played an extremely important role in each of the dances, particularly in correspondence with the music. Vincent Mantsoe’s “Gula”, for example, was characterized by sounds often found in nature. The lighting went hand in hand with that aspect due to the earthy tones shown. The Dorrance Dance Company did something similar, whereas faster paced music often played when the stage was brightly lit or colorful. The opposite applied as well; slower music with lower notes was played when darker colors or deeper tones were used.

On another note, the Miami City Ballet and Trisha Brown Company used lighting a bit differently. The lighting remained uniform throughout the Trisha Brown Company’s performance, but it emphasized the sad, almost remorseful feeling of the dance. From the deep red tone to the shadows shaping the dancers’ faces, lighting accentuated the message of the dance extremely well. The Miami City Ballet, on the other hand, utilized lighting mainly through shadows. When there were multiple dancers on the stage, the shadows were made bigger, and portrayed different rows of dancers as one unit each. They also used lighting to really get the audience to focus on a single dancer on stage through spotlights. Although the ways in which the four companies used lighting differed, overall, lighting was essential to making the Fall For Dance as amazing as it was.

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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.

Fall for Dance-Vincent Mantsoe

rachelswed

Vincent Mantsoe

Vincent Mantsoe grew up in Soweto, South Africa. Mantsoe learned to dance through youth clubs, street dancing and music videos. He also participated in the traditional rituals involving song and dance that were practiced by the women in his family, who were traditional healers.

In 1990, Mantsoe won a scholarship to Sylvia Glasser’s Moving Into Dance Company. There, he began to explore the possibility of merging street dance with traditional dance. From 1997 until 2001, Mantsoe was associate artistic director of MID. Mantsoe is primarily a solo performer; he has also created work for ensembles including Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York City and COBA (Collective of Black Artists) in Toronto, Canada.

Mantsoe’s choreography combines traditional, contemporary African dance with Asian and ballet influences in a cross-cultural Afro-fusion style. He acknowledges the influence of spirituality in his creative work. He describes his dance as a process of “borrowing” from the “ancestors.” He notes the importance of understanding and appreciating the sources of his traditional movements.

I enjoy his dancing because it is very slow so you can focus on his movements. Also, I appreciate that he is a solo dancer so you can focus on him and not multiple dancers.

References:

http://artsalive.ca/en/dan/meet/bios/artistDetail.asp?artistID=155

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Mantsoe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0JKIAD0d0

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.