The Demands of Contemporary Dance

Have you ever taken an dance class? Or played a sport? Well, there is conflict over if

Among a discourse community of trained dancers, one expects to find individuals who are healthy and active athletes. Aside from technique and movement, health and cardio are underlying factors that play a huge role in a dancer’s career. Many dancers take on a healthy diet in order to maintain their body weight. Something that has been looked down upon in the trained dancers’ community is what it

Ballet “Cry” simply showed to us real life of all African women. Every single American people know what kind of life they went through. Therefore it touched their heard. Alvin Ailey’s “Cry” presented wonderfully combined movements, technique and emotion. Ms. Donna Wood uses tragic face, a mask of sorrow. It is a face born to cry, but when she smiles it is with an innocent radiance, joyfulness that simple and lovely. She never tries consciously to please an audience. He was not only concentrating in movements and physical performance, but also using flowing white gown

Three laps around the gym, minute long planks, crunches, sit-ups, and pushups in a matter of thirty minutes. As a dancer, experiencing and realizing the strength that needs to be present in order for an athlete to grow is vital. We go through long hours of choreography sessions, pain and strain on our bodies, and vigorous training. Many people will disagree on the status of if dance is a sport or not. Both Mary- Elizabeth Esquibel, in her article “Why Dance Will Always Be a Sport” and the infographic entitled “Is Dance a Sport?” attack this controversial dilemma. Even though these arguments use different formats, they use rhetoric similarly.

As a result of reading the forward of “The National Core Arts Standards: A Conceptual Framework for Arts Learning”, I saw that there was some information that I learned from past classes that I already understood. I knew that the standards was first established when Goals 2000s made dance a core subject in all schools. When that happened a council was formed to create standards to make sure that it included the most important concepts and ideas. Art programs are really important for school systems to enforce. The arts help children understand the world and society. The information students learn will help them understand the material they are learning in their other subjects. Having dance classes, will reiterate the information they are working on in other

The dance that I will be focusing on is entitled: thinking sensing standing feeling object of attention. The dance, to me, symbolizes the socialization of persons in Western civilization concerning gender roles. In the beginning there are gestures that are separated from emotion and full-embodiment, but as the dance progresses the gestures become more meaningful and recognizable. The lighting starts out very specific and narrow, then the light encompasses the entire stage, and eventually the dancers are silhouetted as they return to a familiar movement motif in the end. The music is mainly instrumental with occasional soft female vocals, and the lyrics suggest emotion, which is interesting because the dancers do not convey emotion until

To prove everyone wrong, an interest was sparked in supporting ballet to show the world that American artists are just as competence as its foreign competitors. Unlike the Russians who have already established their mark in the ballet world, Americans were not commonly associated as talented ballet dancers. Thus, in 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower set aside $2,250,00 to fund dance, theatre, music, and sports tours to showcase American talents around the world. One of the funded dance tours was a ballet tour by New York City Ballet’s in Western Europe and the Soviet Union in 1962 (Croft, p. 425). New York City Ballet was a company founded by Balanchine and Kristen so their ballet performances reflected the innovation style of American ballet while maintaining its classical grace. Before their tour in the Soviet Union, the dancers were prepared for criticism and even booing during the performance due to the tensions between the two countries. However, all political differences were pushed aside, as “three thousand Soviet ballet fans rose to their feet to celebrate

When choosing a job to apply to Piagetian theory and sociocultural theory, I chose the position of a dance teacher. Children of all ages join dance companies, and the experiences and interactions from this activity can have a great effect on their development. After dancing for so many years I have first hand experience on how it can influence a developing child. These two theories are important when understanding the ways in which a child develops, and this paper will focus on how a dance teacher can aid the development of their students using some of the information from these theories.

Feminism plays a large role in many dance styles in today's society. It is a key tool to use while teaching younger students as proved by the women showcased in the films provided as well as in the articles, “The lens in which I look through everything now is feminist theory and pedagogy” (Jennifer Bolt). Throughout the interview, Bolt touched on how she felt as if she had a loss of voice when it came to fighting for the dance program, it connects back to her learning about how women had to fight for their voice in society when she was just a girl. Claire Wooten explained how she tended to steer away from what she called “The F word” (Wooten) when directing her classes due to how announcing feminist theory right off the bat seemed to put people off. Wooten stated she directed her classes from an emancipatory standpoint, attempting to remove herself from the equation to heighten student experience and self-progression.

Some forms can be that dance is a beautiful form of art, it is definitely qualified as a sport for fun, as a hobby, as a passion or even go for a career in dance.("Dancers as Athletes.") Some of these dance forms may be less intense then others. However, many people are unaware and uninformed about how serious and competitive the dance world can be. Dancers have the same demands on their bodies, health, diet, self esteem and self discipline as any other athlete. (A.Y. Chu and C.H. Wang).

Artists today seem more attached to form than perhaps ever before—wedded to concept, abstraction, gymnastic moves and external appearance” (Robb, Paragraph 4). Dance, for many, is starting to become more and more about technique. With that, dance is going to start (and according to Jennifer, has started) to become more about the hard work, and less about the feeling, leading to a higher amount of workout in every practice. During one practice, not including the actual dancing, a ballerina must warm up with a six minute plank, three hundred sit ups, fifty burpees, running laps, and that’s not even all of it.

My favorite dance was the contemporary routine with Derek, Jaja, and Alexia. The choreographer, Stacey Tookey, explained that the piece was about bravery in different forms: Derek played a veteran, Jaja was portraying a woman leaving an abusive relationship, and Alexia took on the role of a single mother. I really enjoyed the dance because of the story it was trying to convey; each dancer dove into character and brought out complex emotions through their movements. The dancers connected deeply with each of their stories, even though they were completely different people. They were portraying things that they had never personally experienced in their lives before. They showed the strengths of the characters along with their weaknesses, they

To begin with, dancing is an artistic and absolutely creative form of physical activity to express personal emotions to audience through the exciting and breathtaking performances based on standard vocabulary of movements. Ballet and street dance are still remained the most controversial dancing styles among the professional dancers. Though a proper performance of both dancing styles requires hard, strong and disciplined training, in fact they do have a major number of differences in other comparative

In my opinion, Merce Cunningham is the most influential person in the history of contemporary dance. Cunningham was both a dancer and in the early 1940s began to choreograph. A former dancer of the Martha Graham Dance Company, Cunningham went on to found the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, where many of the dancers went on to become prestigious choreographers as well. In his works, the choreography, music and design all work separately yet together. Through his belief that “anything can follow anything” (Au 155), use of space and music, exploration of chance, is what makes Merce Cunningham the most influential person in the history of dance.

Mammals consume oxygen and produce carbon dioxide as part of their metabolism process in order to maintain body functions. This occurs at all times, both rest and during intense work, within mammals. During times of greater work, skeletal muscles work harder than they do at rest. This in turn increases their metabolic rate and results in a greater demand for oxygen. It has been proposed that fitness training has a positive effect on both the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, which effect the maximum oxygen consumption rate during intense exercise periods. I hypothesize that individuals who aerobically exercise a minimum of at least 7 hours per week will have increased fitness, which will maximize their overall metabolic rates and give them higher VO2 max and VCO2 max values than individuals who do not have increased fitness. Ten males having different fitness levels were put on stationary bikes at increasing levels until exhaustion and VO2-max and VCO2-max was then measured from each individual. It was found that there was a slight upward trend between fitness-VO2max and fitness-VCO2max, although this trend was not statistically significant when represented by the T-test values through statistical analysis. Further experiments should be done in the future to verify a statistically significant correlation.