Concert Intime is a wonderful dance performance which was held in April 9, 2016 at Chapman University. Two directors Alicia Guy and Liz Maxwell, professional choreographers, and talented Chapman students brought audiences an intimate and colorful evening with seven performance pieces. They were Innumerable, Metamorphosis, Children of the Drum, All as One, and And the Winner Is. In each piece, audiences could enjoy a unique story in the past or modern life and a great combination of customs, light, music, and body languages. The first performance piece was Innumerable choreographed by Cristina McKeever. It was based on the famous documentary Numbered by Danna Doron and Uriel Sinai. The story is about Auschwitz prisoners in the concentration camps. Regardless of religion, all these people were tattooed on their arms or chests with serial numbers. There are approximately 400,000 prisoners in Auschwitz, but only some several thousand survivors are still alive today. In order to attract the audiences, the piece started with a woman’s voice speaking the quotation of Primo Levi, one of the survivor in Auschwitz, “With time, my tattoo has become a part of my body. I do not display and do not hide it. I show it unwillingly to those who ask out of curiosity, readily and with anger to those who say they are incredulous.” Eight dancers then appeared and danced in groups as well as in pairs and alone. Especially, they displayed a lot of run motions in order to portray the Auschwitz
The Faculty Dance Concert was an entertaining event filled with a variety of dance styles. The show took place on Friday, November 6, 2015, at 7:30 in the evening, and was held in the Fullerton College Campus Theatre. The founding artistic director is Melanie Kay Rosa and the assistant artistic director is Lisa M. Anderson. The dance faculty choreographers are Lisa M. Anderson, Sarah Cashmore, Teresa Jankovic, and Melanie Kay Rosa. The four guest choreographers are Helen Gardea, Robert Laos, Devon Smith and Shawnee Amara Williams. The two student choreographers are Ashely Garcia and Madeline Young.
The choreographic intention of “Emergence” was the exploration of merging diverse elements together to see what comes from it, like the emergence in relation to arrangements and structures made in nature. The choreographic intention expanded from the idea of concealment. This was clearly identified in the beginning trio where the female dancer is shown trying to escape from her hiding place. In appraisal, the choreographic intention of “Image” was a more simplistic interpretation, one that explored identity and how it is made up of personal experiences we endure and that along the way we are influenced and sometimes inveigled, which can make revealing who we really are at the core oppressive. In comparison to “Emergence”, the movement in “Image” was more vague and indefinite in relation to linking movement to the choreographic intention. Through manipulation of structural devices such as groupings, stillness, tempo and dynamics, the
My life would be incomplete without performing music. I’ve spent time, in concert bands, in bell choirs, in school and church choirs, and singing, playing in music festivals, and in pit bands trying not to laugh my head off at the actors’ improvisations. But the art that truly speaks to my soul does not lie in creating music, it lies in dancing to it.
When the show actually began, it started with a digital green timer on the wall counting by the second, accompanied by Mr. Jones sitting at a desk with a desk lamp. He began to read a story as a single dancer in a pink long sleeved top danced beside him. This dancer was definitely the most memorable mover of the company due to her exquisite fluidity within her movement, as well as the desirable synchronization between her movements and the words of Mr. Jones’s voice throughout the piece. As the performance carried on, the other dancers performed various solos, duets, and quartets, of modern movement while Mr. Jones’s stories carried on.
21st of May, California State University of Long Beach held the CSULB Dance In Concert at Martha B. Knoebel Dance Theater with the collaboration and choreography by the CSULB dance faculty such as Colleen Dunagan, Rebecca Lemme, Sophie Monat, Andrew Vaca, and featuring guest Laurel Jenkins and Doug Varone. From the show, the dances represented through various genre such as contemporary, contemporary ballet, and modern dance. The element of contemporary defines as a collaborative style that includes modern, jazz, ballet, and hip hop. All these styles of dances were shown by connections after each intermission. In particular, I will concentrate mostly about contemporary dance out of all the dances in the concert and talk about the effects on three out of six performances. The performances reflects mostly on how we describe life and nature and partially define life to every aspect of the emotion were being introduced by the dancers.
Alvin Ailey’s Revelations quickly became a defining dance document of African American culture for all of its audiences. “For Ailey, Revelations realized the largely untapped potential of black dancers to inform concert dance with the profound cultural heritage of African American experience” (DeFrantz, 25).
The Repertory Dance Company Fall Dance Concert was held at the Mannoni Performing Arts Center. The dancers involved in this dance concert are part of the University of Southern Mississippi Dance Department meaning they are either pursuing a degree in dance or teach dance at a university level. Both students and faculty had the opportunity to present work during adjudication to be chosen to be presented at this concert. I particularly enjoyed this concert because, while all of the dances presented were a part of the broad genre of modern dance, each dance had such a unique aesthetic so the concert still provided a great amount of variety to keep the audience captivated. The two pieces I have chosen to review represent this variety very
My name is Hamzah Sait, the date of the performance was the 23rd of April, and it was located at the Stevie Eller Dance Theatre. The concert was titled Jump Start which means it is the end of the old era and time for the young choreographers and dancers at the university of Arizona to shine and go around the world. The dances were basically performed by UA students that have been practicing throughout the semester, and they call it, spring collection. The names of the performances that I am going to talk about are as the following: The process, from our insides out, and Breakfast Burritos. And the choreographers for the pieces that I am going to discuss are: Tanner Boyer, Kira
The first piece was entitled “You, Me, & Us”. Due to having troubles catching the MARTA bus, I missed a good portion of this performance and had to view the rest of the performance on the teleprompter. The dancers were moving in a circle with a person in the center and all of the dancers were wearing earth tones. The music was very serene and at the conclusion of the performance, all of the dancers hugged each other. From what I saw, this performance represented how all humans are interconnected on this Earth, this can be seen by all of the dancers hugging in the end and also the title of the piece.
It had a visible rhythm. The dancers started with just using the walls and dancing with the walls. They dropped them to the floor, slid them into different spots, let the walls fall on the them, and passed them to each other. Then they started to tell the story. Throughout the dance there was unison dancing, non unison dancing, duets with partnering, trios, and quartets. There was a lot of pedestrian movement especially walking. A lot of the transitioning locomotor movement was walking or running. There was lot of small little movements with the hands and fingers and that was the only body part they were moving. They did movements like opening up the hand slowly, twisting one finger, and tapping one finger. Some of the movements were very literal, and visibly went along with the words in the story. Other movements were not literal; they were very abstract. One literal movement happened during the part in the story when the one daughter died from the failed abortion. One female dancer touched her stomach as if it was in pain. There was also contrasting movement. While one or two dancers were doing more complex movement phrases the other dancers were doing simple movements like walking or were in stillness. The partnering was untraditional and included weight sharing. The females lifted the males sometimes which is unusual. For example, there was one lift where the female dancer lifted the male dancer onto her back while she had the microphone in her hand and was talking. Her voice did not change one bit either. Different choreographic elements were used. One that was used a lot was repetition. The end of the dance had more of a distinct rhythm than the beginning, and was lighter. The first part was more heavy looking due to all the sadness. It ended with the dancers holding their hands in a
Dance is defined by Webster as “moving rhythmically to music, typically following a set sequence of steps”. However, it can also be used to sway an audience’s judgment or exhibit feelings and emotions that cannot be conveyed by the usage of verbal language. When watching a show, I would like to be able to get something out of it and with this it brought childhood memories and rung my old tomboy ways and made me realize not only is it okay to sometimes still have those tomboyish habits but also to see you don’t always have to be an adult and take everything in life seriously. During this performance two of my favorite pieces were 909 Lamentations and On the surface. I felt as if these were two of the strongest pieces throughout the whole performance.
Oh, the sights and smells of Cuban culture! Or was it sights and sounds? It seems as though every single sense was simultaneously stimulated together during the breath taking performance of Malpaso Dance Company. On Wednesday, September 16, 2015, the Malpaso Dance Company, led by executive director and co-founder Fernando Saez Carvajal performed at the Carpenter Theatre, in Richmond, Virginia. The company performed two pieces: “Under Fire” and “Despedida” choreographed by Trey McIntyre and Osnel Delgado Wambrug respectively.
I liked the dance piece because the dancers were limited physically in their bodies, but their dancing was beyond limited and astounding. At first, I was a bit doubtful and sceptical before watching the dance because I thought the dancers were going to perform with very minimal and stiff movements. But to my surprise, the dancers moved gracefully on stage. The two dancers used quite a lot of space. The dancers used all levels of space from low to high. For example, the dancers executed amazing leaps, jumps and lifts in their performance that represented as high levels of space. The dancers movements were grand; however, they were also whimsical, sharp, circular, and clean. The dancers utilized most parts of the stage. The pattern of the space that performers used was more curved than linear. There were two dancers in this piece, the male dancer that had only one leg and the female dancer that had only one arm. The genre of dance that was performed was a ballet; though, in my observations the dance seemed to be more contemporary than ballet. For instance, the tempo of the dance was slower and had less rhythm than most classical ballets I’ve observed. Also, there were a couple of pauses and rests during the performance. The dance
When I saw the piece, named, “Lapa’s Lament, I thought it was very unique and interesting. When the dancers were doing several movements with it, I got very confused. As a result, this confusion caused me to draw all the attention towards the dancer and to their performance. After a dance progresses, dancers were trying to tell a story with their movements. I think some of the dance movements, they were doing was very fascinating to watch. As a result, I was trying to make the whole story in my mind, as it was very unclear for me, what they were doing, but when Randy James came and talk little bit about the dance, I would able to understand what the dance is about. The way his dancers performed by showing their emotions, I thought it was incredibly performed. I felt that this dance was not losing its limelight throughout the performance. That is, the way they were communicating with each other through their body language and physical contact was just amazing. It shows their effort, as the dance steps included twisting and tumbling. Some of the dance steps, I have never saw in any of the dance companies who came to performed. I felt the dance was full of body movements, and I thought it would require a lot of physical strength to perform this kind of
This fall dance concert was filled with joy, darkness, torture, culture, and women's rights, right when you sit down and observe through all 8 dance performances. It would have been 9 dance routines but the dancer who was suppose to perform Hart Broken had an injury, which made a putt off. Nevertheless the show must go on, it starts off with the first and second performance, Xtra Xtra and Scar Tissue. Revealing that both performances were different themes because Xtra Xtra had the dancers in radiant colors and seemed to be energetic, whereas the performers in Scar Tissue were clothed in black attire, such as tutus, dresses, and tights, yet still energetic. This brought to my attention that the whole dance performances were contrast to each other. Throughout the routines of the dance concert, the