Day 3

I discussed with the other dancers, who had been in the class on Monday, what the piece as a whole was based on. I gather it focuses on the line between chaos and order, groups and individuals, and group mentality and identity. These ideas are quite open and could present a deeper, social and political view of the dance. Now that I have discussed this I can see how these ideas have been used within the dance and would go together with the idea I had about the dance having a tribal feel. Today, the individual phrases were developed, added on to and pieced together into a 10-minute section. The main phrase, the one I wrote about yesterday, which had a tribal feel, was developed with an exploration of breathing and movement. The breathing follows the movement so that a falling motion is done on an out breath and rises on an in breath. The effect is quite mesmerizing as it forces you, as an audience member, to match your own breathing with that of the dancers, to a certain extent. The sound of breath, although perhaps the most natural of sounds, is quite sinister when so many dancers are breathing in unison. It is very raw and very human, which is perhaps why I found it made the dancers more human because the movement was coming from inside, from the breath. I’ve seen this before in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s “Rosas Danst Rosas” and I find it quite ethereal and deeply emotional. Whispering was also added to this piece, I find talking within a dance very intriguing. I think because it is not expected it has an impact on an audience, there is no reason why speech should not be added into a dance, personally I find it brings deeper meaning to a piece. In this case perhaps showing order and group identity. The development of the duets involved splitting up the group to perform at different times around the space. A lot of time was spent developing a phrase danced in a clump, where everyone stands very close together. It was interesting to see how the choreographers worked with the dancers, using different ideas, assessing them and then deciding which worked best and being ready to change things. The phrase itself presented a lot of the ideas about chaos and order, and groups and individuals. The marching style four-step phrase suggests order, even more so when the group is huddled together in a clump. Some travelling movements let the group disperse slightly but the marching kept bringing them back to the clump. The use of a microphone here is quite innovative and not something I’ve seen before in a dance work. The use of live singing from a dancer in a work focused on dance is also something quite new to me but I found it worked really well to get across this idea of group mentality and individuals. The group stopping an individual expressing, and rejecting them when they do, expression being represented by the microphone. This is what I gather from the piece anyway. The dance is an exploration and any audience member may have different ideas about it.