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Concert Review

Decent Essays

I attended this concert at CU Denver’s King Center, Concert Hall. Although the architectural design and surrounding did not attest to much artistic creativity, the actual concert was better than my expectations. I did have lower expectations because it was presented by students instead of professional musicians or dancers as in my last concert review. The ensemble, a collaborative outcome from MSU Denver and other dance/cultural music groups from denver, was actually a mix of African and Indian/East Asian music and dance. The two teams alternated between each other giving the audience a great deal of contrast of movement and sound. My favorite were the second and fifth performances, African and Indian respectively.
The second performance by …show more content…

The males and females separated themselves into two lines facing each other. Then a person from the male side danced his way across to the female line and evaluated each female until he found someone he wanted. He then held her hand and took her to the middle to dance together. The whole process is accompanied by four drums and one metallic percussion instrument, I believe a Ghanaian musical instrument. The metallic instrument helped create a background beat with which all the dancers can keep pace. The rhythm of the drums then combined with this background linear beat to create a more diverse and interesting sound. I did notice that each movement, a step to the side or a lifting of an arm for example, all followed this rhythm. The simplistic nature of the music, plain homophonic texture with an ABAB form and a …show more content…

They presented a story of a goddess teasing a boy with a magical ball, then throwing it into a pond where a monster is asleep. The boy then awakens this monster trying to reach the ball. The story is meant to encourage people to face their fears and fight for what they want. I liked how they used the same movements when they were describing the story before starting their performance which they later used during the dance. For example, one of the dancers showed the same throwing movement which she later used in the performance. The dance was accompanied by an Indian chant like song over the speakers. It had the same simplistic nature as the African music discussed above which I again noticed that it put the focus on the dancers. They music and movement was much slower and calmer than the Africans, which makes sense when seen in light of the Eastern Asian spiritual philosophy of

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