professor uchizono
Only half of the first year Macaulay students have uploaded their images for Snapshot Day. Please make sure you have done so. Here are the instructions on how to do this: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/snapshot/
The deadline has been extended until tomorrow, Wednesday, October 28. Please spread the word. Thanks!
Alexandra emailed me with a few concerns about in-text citations. We discussed some of these in class yesterday but here again are the things we talked about. Remember that citing is sort of a game and it can be frustrating at times. If you need anything please do not hesitate to reach out to me and I will do my best to help.
Here is the direct link to the Purdue Owl page on MLA in-text citations.
Zotero has an easy plugin for Firefox that allows you to click on any webpage and add it into your Zotero library. 
If you click the Z it will open up a Zotero library at the bottom of the page.
Once you have all your sources imported into the library you can make your bibliography.
The following menu will come up.
Paste your bibliography into your final paper.
According to Sally Banes, Post-Modern dance refers to a group of choreographers in the 60s and 70s who sought to upend traditional dance forms like ballet and ask questions about the nature of dance as an artform. Some questioned whether dance required musical accompaniment : others questioned whether dance had to convey meaning and narrative: and still others questioned what was and was not dance, breaking down the barriers between choreographed movement on a stage and pedestrian movement on a street. Coming out of this strain of thought was the Analytic Post-Modern Dance movement of the 70s, which stripped elaborate costumes for everyday attire. The plain aesthetics of analytic post-modern dance marked a focus on pure movement as opposed to using dance to convey thoughts or stories about something else, an emphasis that requires the viewer to focus on the minute details of the dancers’ movements.
Ariella mentioned the political/social connotations of Steve Paxton and how dancers in Contact Improvisation had to trust and support each other, but I think it would be better to focus on how Contact Improvisation forces each dancer to be intimately aware of the other dancers’ bodies and their movements, since this connects Contact Improvisation with Analytic Post-Modern Dance in general. Obviously all dance requires its participants to know their performance well, but improvisation prevents performers from “autopiloting” movements they’ve rehearsed, forcing them to pay close attention to the performance as they perform it. By requiring its performers to be intimate with their movements, Contact Improvisation joins the tradition of analytic post modern dance in making us look deeply at every motion of a dancer.
Trisha Brown’s work also deals with the concept of forcing oneself to look deeply at each and every motion in a dance. In “Accumulation”, this is accomplished through the use of repetition and iteration. By structuring the dance so that simple motions are repeated and then added upon, Brown gives the audience a lot of time to think about each little movement before she adds the next one. Each new iteration makes the audience think about how all the little motions in that iteration fit together before they can look at the next motion and how it fits with all the previous ones. Basically, the viewer is forced to look at each motion individually and look at all the motions holistically, giving them deep understanding of the dance on multiple levels once everything is said and done.
So I’m actually blog A but I got confused because of the syllabus so.
I feel like that in post-modern dance, dance is being established as an art form independent of other art forms like music or literary ideas. Dance does not need to have a story or be accompanied by music to be dance, but rather it is simply movement for the sake of movement. The post modern dance aesthetic explores and goes beyond past boundaries, and encourages experimentation in vastly different direction. Some make dance question its own purpose and meaning, some incorporate political themes, etc. One of the ideas in post modern dance is repetition and time. Repetition emphasizes the passing of time. The usage of time in dance can also be a physical passage of time, not an artificial meter. Movement and time can both be more relaxed. Other directions include the idea of dance for the performer, not the viewer, and dance being imperfect and transient, that a performance can be a performance if improvised and with mistakes.
Trisha Brown is a famed choreographer associated closely with post modern dance and contributed greatly to its ideas and development, such as thought about movement. Some of her early works provoked thought on the different perception of perspective, space, time and orientation to gravity. One of her works Walking on the Wall, revisits the most basic of movements, walking, but (as the name implies) on a wall, opposing gravity. Another idea that she developed is accumulation and repetition. She uses accumulation in her dance style by increasing one element at a time, as one becomes two and two becomes three and so on. Her style draws heavily from the everyday movement and repetition.
-Jessica Ng
Analytical Post-Modern Dance arose in the 1970’s and centered around the structure of movement in performance. This phase of Post-Modern Dance continued to build upon the experimentation works of the 1960’s. Many of the terms used to describe this phase of Post-Modern Dance seem out-of-place in the realm of dance. Sally Banes uses “impersonal”, “goal-oriented”, and “objective” to describe the choreographic works (Banes XXI). As Glenn mentioned, movements were isolated in a somewhat scientific light in order to highlight the thought of movement itself. The Analytical works stripped performances of their “expressive elements such as music, special lighting, costumes, props…” (XX). Focusing on repetition and patterning of simple movements, choreographers created pieces using performers that were not trained in dance. This differed from past dance genres in which a technical vocabulary and movement set was required and performers were trained in specific techniques.
One of the other important choreographers in the Analytical phase of Post Modern Dance was Trisha Brown. Her piece Accumulation (1971) she focused on simplistic movements that were repeated and then altered in specific patterns. As the performance continues, it becomes more complex; the lengthening of repeating chains of movements creates an intricate choreography that increases in difficulty as it progresses. Trisha Brown also worked with a variety of performance spaces including using the walls of rooms and the sides of buildings. In these pieces she worked with the idea of gravity and the apparent balance between flying and falling as her dancers repelled on the walls. Much of Trisha’s work was done in silence, with selected pieces having spoken words aspects to them and very few incorporating music. Both Brown and Steve Paxton joined the improvisation group names Grand Union in early 1970 and continued to do group work as well as their individual choreography. The group helped choreographers share their ideas as well as test out new and experimental choreography while working together to create new improvisational pieces. Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton and the Grand Union all played an important role in the expansion of Post-Modern Dance analytical phase.
Eli McClain
I took this photo while I was walking along the western side of Central Park looking for good snapshots. I incorporated the Rule of Thirds by placing the building on the left third and the truck on the bottom third, and I made sure that the truck had a bit of space to move into. When I was taking pictures in Central Park, I was frustrated by the shadows cast by all the trees. It made it difficult to get a shot of an object and its shadow like I mentioned in my previous photography post. But now, I see that I accidentally used the shadows to my advantage. The building, which is the focus of the piece, is in direct sun, while the truck and foliage are in shadow. The lighting contrast is pleasing to the eye and helps to emphasize the building further. You could even go so far as to say that the dark foliage and well-lit building give off a nice contrast between the natural and the artificial However, the foliage in direct light works it against this somewhat. The way in which the branches extend offscreen help to capture the expansiveness of the forest and act like a natural frame. I’m not sure if white, blue and green is considered a good color combination, but I think it looks pretty good.
Side note: I have no idea what this building is or what it is for.
This photo for snapshot day was taken in the evening on the stoop of my house. I had been sitting there, keeping an eye on my young niece who playing around in our empty driveway. She came and sat next to me when she tired herself out, and she pointed to all the things her little eyes could focus on. “Mare Mare, who lives in that house? Who lives in that house? Why is that tree so big? That light is so orange why is that lamp outside?” On and on, her questions went and it made me think about how intently she was taking in her surroundings, and how long it had been since I had done the same. There she was, pointing at the same houses I wondered who lived in, the same tree I stared up at, the same street lamp I stared at during snowstorms, and so on. I took out my camera and snapped a photo of the street that I had grown up looking at but hardly ever taking in. This is a photo that fills me with the nostalgia of really looking at the street I lived in, instead of merely glancing at it all- a habit I would have been stuck in were it not for the eyes of a five year old to remind me what that is like.
I took this picture with the rule of third in mind. I made sure that the tree was placed off center and to the right of the frame. In addition, I made sure that the row of houses in the background were slightly diagonal; were they shot on a perfectly flat, horizontal line, the image would not have been as appealing. When focusing on the street, I ensured that there would be a visual path to be followed, as I angled it to give something traveling along it room to move across the street. This does not count the car on the right, though; it has no room to “move” but that is because it was not in motion; it was parked and so I did not know if it needed a visual “path” to move across.
-Mary Yanez
On October 11th I spent the day traveling to Philadelphia with the Quidditch team. As we were driving away from New York we watched as the sun rose over the skyline of Manhattan. I knew I would not be able to take photos during the day so I wanted to capture an aspect of the city at the first chance I got. It was hard to catch a clear photo as the cars passed around us over bridges and through tunnels. This photo is a contrast to the stressful and busy day that I had. The small portion of light in the middle third of the photo focuses the eyes to the colors of the sunrise. The profile of the face blacked out in the photo gives an interesting border to the skyline behind. While this picture is not similar to Kertesz’s Montmartre, I think there is a simplistic aspect to the composition. The photo does not project any ideas of movement yet the gradient of colors suggests the passing of time.
-Eli McClain
This is the photo I took for snapshot day. It is located in Central Park East, exactly where I don’t exactly know because I had been wandering around for some time prior to my discovery of this bridge. My intention for the shot was to contrast the small family in the bottom right with the large bridge that horizontally intersects the page. The families relative size both in number of member and in relation to the bridge is a metaphor for the significant decrease in importance placed on family by today’s society. Family as I priority is frequently placed behind academics, work, friends, and extracurricular activities. Families have stopped eating dinner together and talking about their daily events. There is a large looming pressure, especially for adults and older children, to bridge the gap between professional life and home life. One one side you have to do well in your school and work career so that you can continue to support your family. But on the other, if you are not spending enough quality time with your loved ones is your financial support and security worth the damage that befalls your nuclear relationships? Especially female professionals in this era are under constant pressure and scrutiny for their priorities and values. If you spend too much time with your children you’re giving in to the misogynistic views that have oppressed our gender for centuries. IF you spend too little time with your children in favor of advancing your career you are considered unfeminine, callous, and cold for not caring about your responsibility to your family. This is a bridge we cannot escape and we cannot ignore as it casts an almost constant shadow over our life path. We must cross under it, as it is unavoidable, and find a way to salvage what is left of today’s familial priority. This snapshot was meant to capture today’s familial struggle and the way in which we must face it, together.
Sally Banes, in her reading, sets the stage for analytic post-modern dance to be the natural progression in the evolution of dance, following post-modern dance that is. The post-modern dance was a hostile rejection of the definitions and limitation of dance; the next step would be to redefine dance after having expressed their distaste for the old constraints in dance. In analytic post-modern dance, the focus on dance moved away from expressing personal meaning. Rather than putting a personal meaning into the dance, it instead became focused on the movements of a dance- Banes described the focus on body movements as akin to being “goal-oriented”. The dances of this were not very high energy, but displayed a good sense of control over the body as well a more fluid movement (as opposed to the tense movements of other dance styles).
Steve Paxton was the father to the Contact Improvisation dance style, which emerged from the analytic post-modern dance era in 1973. Contact improvisation incorporates many aspects of the analytic post-modern dance, as the style did not have a personal meaning for every single dance. Contact improvisation was and continues to be about a dancer and their body interacting with another dancers as well as with gravity; it is about a focus on the way two partners spontaneously move together while keeping contact. The movements themselves were very fluid and not very energetic- from my time in the contact improvisation class, I was able to see first hand that the dance was like watching two people sliding over and against each other, rolling with the movements of the other. Just as the dance style encourages a more relaxed and free-flowing movement, it also requires one to be able to think kinetically; the entire dance is improvised on the spot, as the name would suggest, so the dancers must be able to take whatever movements their partner is providing and then react accordingly. All in all, Paxton innovated a dance style which fit perfectly into the era which spawned it.
-Mary Yanez
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