Attending A Dance Concert At Cypress College

The date was December 8th, 2017, I had the pleasure of seeing the Saddleback College Jazz Combos perform at the McKinney Theater. The theater is quite large holding about 100~200 seats but seemed to offer a good acoustic balance for the combos that played. Also, one can tell that it was the holiday season by just entering the theater. It was festive as it was decorated with christmas trees with christmas lights and the front was filled with light up flower vases. Furthermore, this concert is a cumulation of different jazz students put into small groups and perform in front of an audience. This concert also showcases their efforts as a group as well as differences in skill level amongst the combos.

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.

On November 17th, 2016, I attended a jazz concert and had quite a time. The experience was captivating, and gave me a warm feeling inside. There were three different bands that play in the hour slot, and all of them sounded magnificent, but “The Santé Fe Jazz Combo” and “Santa Fe Big Band” stood out the most. The only thing these two bands have in common is that some of the musicians play in both bands. Otherwise, these jazz fanatics are polar opposites.

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.

Watching a video of a dance piece called “The Moroccan Project,” choreographed by Alonzo King was quite impressive. Living in San Francisco and taking dance classes brought me to Lines Ballet which is King’s dance studio. I have seen a great deal of different types of dance at the studio waiting for my Ballet classes and there are some great dancers. It comes as no surprise that Alonzo would have such great dancers. It appears that Alonzo King is exploring different cultures in dance in Contemporary Ballet. His near-perfect choreography is articulate, passionate, and graceful- he brings diversity in dance to San Francisco and other parts of the world. This piece articulates the expression of the two dancers coming together yet dancing apart at times- it is a fusion of several different types of dances into one using video editing to create a story about the coming together of two individuals.

The La Costa Canyon High School Winter Dance Recital was a fun and upbeat, communal experience that allowed the opportunity to watch fellow students excel in their own individual strengths. Each dance was creatively choreographed to portray a message whether slow or fast, happy or sad. The overall experience was enjoyable and definitely repeatable.

The melody sounds somber and serious and the energy of the dancers suddenly changes. A spoken word takes place and all of the dancer begin to tell their stories of pain and struggle through movements. The spoken word talks about the journey of men and women who overcame social injustice. In the dancer's movements you could clearly see how they correlated together. Movements were powerful and restraint at the same time giving the audience the idea of the women were pushing through something that was bearing them down. There was a lot of expansion in the chest, back, and arms followed by contractions in the body. As soon as the spoken word was finished the mood of the piece change again and the pianist began to play a upbeat tune that brought the dancers back in to a more positive and high spirit. A lot of polyrhythms take place as the dancers jump high and move their arms back and forth moving throughout the space. This happens in unison at first and then solos, trios, and duets happen in this section of the dance. The expression on their faces add charismatic charm to this piece. Their expressions continue to move them into different emotions and feelings that are relatable to everyday

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

On April 14, 2017, my friend and I visited for the first time Salt Lake City Community College dance company’s annual performance. The show was presented at the Grand Theater at the South City Campus of the college. The performance’s name “Moving Words” imply what the audience was about to experience. “Moving Words” consists of 18 different dances and each of those dances brought a unique feeling to the overall performance. I thought that the dancers and choreographers have done an amazing job. However, after seeing all the different dances there were two that stuck together with me, because of the ideas and the morals these dances introduced.

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

The movements were very specific and showed the story of the dance. The partners used many movements that contained many body

On the evening of August 11th, the remarkable trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, an icon of today’s free improvisation, joined the New York-based quirky trio DarkMatterHalo for a concise performance at the East River Park Amphitheater in Manhattan, followed by the charismatic Nublu Orchestra.

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.

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