Upon hearing about the Ralph Lemon performance, I was eager to see what the choreographer had in store for us. I was hoping for a different type of dance than we had seen before. But unfortunately I was disappointed. We were once again in a small single room with a small set and barely any dancing at all. I did appreciate the technology aspect of it. The way the videos and sounds were displayed throughout the performance. But I couldn’t even link them to the “dance” as a whole. Both of the females in the show were very talented actresses but once again I feel as if I was missing out on the dance aspect of it. The only dancing I really saw in the show was the three men dancing to fun, upbeat, music at the end. This was my favorite part of the performance but I couldn’t even really enjoy it because I was thoroughly disappointed with the two preceding hours. I wasn’t even sure how these three men dancing to funk music related to the show in any means what so ever. Overall, I felt very uncomfortable with the performance, and although I appreciate that it was a type of art I do not see how it could be dance. The actresses were talking about things that none of us knew how to react to or make sense of. We couldn’t even look bare at each other during the performance and if we did happen to glance in someone’s direction, it was a look of “what is going on”, or they were just asleep.

When interviewing Levi, one thing he said he loved about New York City was that it was filled with all types of dance. That everywhere you go you can be in “direct conversation” with a different form of this art; and there are very very few places where this can happen. Coming into this Arts In New York City seminar with a dance concentration, I was excited to learn about all of these types of dance. I feel like there are very few weeks left and we have only seen or talked about one type continuously. I appreciate that post modern dance is an under appreciated art form but I really would have like to learn about all of types od dance present within New York City. I feel as if this Ralph Lemon performance really stuck out to me but not in a good way. It was unfortunately just another modern dance performance that left me confused and I was extremely disappointed.

Monica Huzinec

Upon entering The Kitchen where we would be watching Ralph Lemon’s Scaffold my mind was running with the possibilities as to what we were about to see. As soon as the performance began I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be anything like I’ve ever seen before. The first woman to come out first began jumping on what appeared to be a mattress on top of a two-story set and remained doing so at different speeds and paces for a while. She then came down and from what I remember began rambling about people like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and their fans. She went on to permeate the room with an uncomfortable and awkward atmosphere as she read aloud from sexually explicit novels. She finally exited the room in slow and quiet manner. The second woman who came out began by singing a song in a bad and almost very childish tune. Her part of the performance also included a lot of dialogue, some of it explicit too. But one part of her performance that I vividly remember is when she laid down on the floor in the back of the room while a horrid screaming device went on for what felt like 10 minutes. I could feel my ears ringing as the frequencies of the screams changed. I tried to piece together what exactly the movements and dialogue of both women meant but I couldn’t really make sense of them.

Though I do admit that I found my self laughing at some of the humorous parts, by the end of the performance I was just disappointed. The only part of the performance that I truly enjoyed was the final performance piece where three men danced nonstop to infectious musical beats. The main issue I had with Ralph Lemon’s Scaffold was that with it’s two-story set and ongoing dialogue it felt more like one big abstract and confusing theatrical performance. When I chose to take this seminar I hoped to be immersed into the many different cultures of dance and be able to watch a variety of dance performances but so far I feel as if I have really only seen one or two dance pieces with the rest being some kind of movement based art. Overall I feel as though I was disappointed in this performance because it is just another abstract movement based art that left me very confused by the end of it.

-Ariella Caminero

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