The Repertory Dance Company Fall Dance

‘For me, it is important that the work I make finds connection … but at the same time… calls into question our conversations of what dance is’ (Garry Stewart, 2010). Garry Stewart, the Artistic Director of Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) since 1999, began his dance training at the age of twenty, after leaving university studying social work. Through his explosive, energetic and electrifying style, his unique dance pushes drives boundaries empowering his works, which are technically demanding, frightful and exhausting, creating an intriguing performance. In his pieces ‘Birdbrain’ and ‘G’ a combination of classical ballet, contemporary dance and gymnastics is utilized throughout to create a fascinating performance. Stewart’s productions have toured

The two live dance works viewed this year were “Emergence”, performed by Sydney Dance Company, choreographed by Rafael Bonachela, performed at the Princess Theatre and a recorded dance performance titled “Image”, choreographed by Jason Northam and Liesel Link. The two dance performances substantiated were exceedingly diverse and dissimilar. The two performances juxtaposed their intentions and interpreted opposing elements through diversity in movement vocabulary, structural devices and form, performance skills and technical elements.

In the third section Ms. Donna Wood looks like an African goddess and her body has an unexpected gracefulness. Even stage color was bright reddish, warm atmosphere around the dancer, like a sunrise in the morning. Stage would fill with colors. Music and performer are singing together. A sound of music tempo gets faster. She has the happiest face ever, no pain and no slavery. She jumps, she swings her leg and arms, and even she pulls her dress up and shows her leg an entire dance. Sound and lightening create the environment and good mood. She uses high level of dance than in previous two sections. She moves in between melody. I liked how she uses

In “Stripping the Emperor: The Africanist Presence in American Concert Dance”, Gottschild begins by introducing unique aspects of the Africanist aesthetic including how it embraces differences and instead of the traditional European idea of resolving conflict, Africanist aesthetic presents a question and demonstrates the beauty in accepting conflict. One way in which the Africanist aesthetic differs from European ballet is how they utilize polycentrism, having multiple centers of movement, and polyrhythm, when different body parts keep multiple rhythms. Other ways include the high-affect juxtaposition, changes in mood, movement, or tempo, to the drastically contrasting sharpness and intensity in the movements. Gottschild’s main point in her article is to describe how the Africanist aesthetic is much less strict

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 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

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.

The next piece was entitled “Satin and Tulle”. It began with a dancer in pointe ballerina shoes and a leotard coming out towards the audience and dropping pointe ballet shoes in front of us. The dancers were pulling what seemed to be the ribbons on a pointe ballet shoe out from backstage onto the stage. The ribbons were the focal point on this performance. The dancers then became tangled up in the ribbons, almost as if the dancers were lost within their passion of dance, and continued to dance in perfect unision. The dancers would place the ribbons around their necks, like the dancers wanted to harm themselves. With the music, I noticed that whenever the music became very loud and busy, the dancer would

The movement started out very literal to the story that was being told. It was characterized by a lot of hand gestures, stillness and walking. In the same way, the dancers’ narration of the conversation between Bill T Jones and Dora was separate from the dancing on the rest of the stage. However, as the story evolved, the movement became for poetic, interpretive and full-bodied. The dancers often uncontrollably shook different parts of their bodies, and stomped around the stage. Yet, there was a sense of awareness among the dancers as they were constantly watching each other. The movement was very gender-neutral especially in lifts and there was a lot of experimenting with the weight of other humans. It is also important to note that language was the majority of the sound score for the performance, and that the dancers began to speak while they moved. The tone of the narration was mostly calm, serene and factual; however, certain phrases would act as a gateway to Dora’s emotion that would explode into music and dance. The contrasting and interwoven simple but complex movement and music served to convey a lot of ideas. The idea of evolution returned through the way the movement evolved from literal to poetic and the narration changed from separate to inside the movement. Essentially, this idea of evolution in costume, props, movement and music allowed to performance to not just tell the story but to become Dora’s story. It seemed to mirror the idea that when someone recalls a memory it is easy to become submerged in the thought and nostalgia for that moment. At the same time, this conveyed how history is still alive, that the past is always part of the present. The narration was not laden with historical stories that often can alienate an audience. It was very personal, which allowed the audience to connect on a human level with Dora’s story. The audience was able to

Petipa’s production of Swan Lake is a beautiful example of the structure movements that dancers must perform; in the clip titled Odile entrance & Black Swan pas de deux, you see “The Black Swan” perfect posture and balance, dancing on en Pointe all the while managing to gracefully seduce the prince through her seductive movements and entrancing expressions. In contrast Modern dance focus is on the dancer expressing their inner most emotions and feelings through free flowing movements. The modern dancer uses their whole body more naturally and fluidly to convey what their current emotional state is, unlike classical ballet where the ballerina at all times keeps an upright posture, and performs with structured, angular lines. Martha Graham’s “Frontier” is a great example of the free movements of Modern dance; In this performance Martha Graham uses her whole body to move to the rhythmic sounds of the drums and music, you can clearly see that there is no confined structure in this performance, she is completely moving organically to how she is feeling and what she is trying to convey through her movements.

I attended the Repertory Dance Theater concert on March 5, 2016 at 7:30 PM in the Snow College Theater - Eccles Center for Performing Arts. The concert was held because the Repertory Dance Theater was celebrating their 50th Anniversary. Dancers were touring around Utah and performing in almost every city. Concert consisted of five choreographed dance performances that lasted for about 2 hours. They were performed in this order: Suite from Mazurkas, Jack, Crippled up blues and other tales of Deseret, Begging the question and Pigs and Fishes. Today I am going to be analyzing all of these five dances.

The first piece, “Traveling Through Her,” used variation in time, space, repetitive movements and patterns throughout their piece. I enjoyed the way the dancers were evenly spaced out throughout the stage, using different levels and the upper space which is usually considered negative space. This piece used indirect and direct movements. For example, Misha was on a stepping box and she was doing indirect movements that affected the other dancers movement in time and space. I thought

I expected the show to be more upbeat and salsa based. However, the performers used salsa dancing in many different ways. Keeping the same quality of salsa in the torso, but changed up how they were using their arms and would transpose it to the floor and used it as floor work across the stage. They would also use salsa for slower movement. There were times the salsa that they used was very slow in contrast to how the upbeat salsa looked. The different movement that stood out to me more in this performance, was the choreography that we did during our master class. I noticed that flocking was used throughout the performance, but was not taking too far. They would use it to symbolize community as everyone would come together. During the flocking portions, a lot of the movement was upright in the vertical plane and was very sharp. What caught my eye as an audience member was during the flocking, there would be a soloist off to the side doing the complete opposite of movement quality than the group. For example, while the group was performing sharp angular movements, the soloist would be to the side performing flowy movement that used all three levels on the body. However, as I say that it caught my eye, there were times that I thought so much was happening on stage I caught myself not engaged in the performance. As the performance started to grow into the story that they were portraying, the movement quality became very flowy from all performers in a sense that they reminded me of water. The performers used a huge amount of spine articulation. As they used a lot of undulations in the body, the performers would make them big as if they were dancing for the whole audience. Their energy of their movement seemed bigger than what they were dancing. The movement seemed indirect and used a great amount of different stage space as most of

Dance is significant to our society; the aspects of Modern/Contemporary Dance have adjusted the viewpoint of the society to view it as a perpetual embryonic form of art. The evaluation exhibited in this document will contain concise interpretations of the pieces performed by the "Mark Morris Dance Group", followed by a comprehensive examination of the pieces "A Forest", "Pure Dance Items", "Serenade", and "Dancing Honeymoon."

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