encyclopaedia of ways to wiggle

we were next to a row-full of dancer-students
It took me a while to realise just how limited the audience usually was at these things - once I cottoned on it felt like such a closed world: I came to suspect that only about 20% of a small-event audience was composed of people who weren't actively *involved* in the admin/practice/learning/teaching of modern dance, and half of that 20% were EX-types etc

(One of the best things I saw wasn't dance itself - one company's performance at The Place involved a 'live' rendition of Ligeti's 'Poeme Symphonique' - 100 difftempo metronomes placed on the stage one by one as the backing quite a sight and sound. This section ended with one ROWR dancer standing there in her underwear doing some geometric routine whilst babbling in french - difficult to think of ART when confronted with that ROWR)

haha Modern Dance = Tarkovsky audience's answer to Lap Dancing haha

I would think there isn't a big leap from Cage's music to what I presume Cunningham does in dance (I've never seen him, alas). Are you able to not demand expressiveness in the performance of Cage's music? Why is it harder to accept in dance?

Is Twyla Tharp modern or jazz? She's probably more of the jazz end I guess.

As I said on the ballet/child abuse thread, I'm not a huge fan, but I've enjoyed some of it.

The main thing I got out of it was a real revulsion to cultural-tourist middlebrow which two of the pieces consisted of: "Here are dances set to music of styles: Celtic, Portugese, and Latin". Yesyes there is "Latin" music which exemplifies a continent you stupid dick. They all speak Latin on the continent too. Far worse was the Russian Peasant whatever dancing which was like a cross between a rogers & hart musical number and Disney's Small World right down to grotesque painted on faces. The Portugese piece was actually okay though, coz the music was spectacular and totally overwhelmed the dancing, which if I tried I could read as a humbled in the presence of god deliberateness instead of just naff choreography.

There was a good piece with Tom Waits music that was very directly telegraphing and capturing the theatricality of the music, but in a modern dance style. The part for Big In Japan could have come straight from an update of West Side Story or cet. and God's Away On Business was tremendously powerful.

The best thing I've ever seen to help me "get" dance was Centerstage which actually captures the lives of dancers and motives of choreographers (the less obscure ones) quite well while pulling the usual teen-flik trix. I think of this now coz the highlight of the evening was an intesnsely personal piece from a first-time choreographer with a practiced company, and it was just spectacular clockwork elegance, the partnering and switches and everything just v. systemically powerful and perfectly in tune with the music.

The one thing I think is that it is necessary to read dance as the aestheticization of ways in which we already wiggle day-to-day -- that formalizing them still leaves them in reference to our own bodies and gestural signifiers should probably find a deep root in our own ways of interpreting body language et. cet, re-imagining ourselves as the dancers firing mirror neurons and feeling their motion as ours.

Or somesuch.

from Anything Can Happen, an article on Encounter Merce from Stanford Magazine:

Dance lecturer Diane Frank, a former instructor with Cunningham’s studio in New York, is teaching an intermediate/advanced class in Cunningham-based technique. “The students rehearse without music and learn to put movements together that don’t usually follow one another,” Frank says.

FACT-CHECK GOLD:
"Most successful of these was Rafael Bonachela's Amox, a slippery, Sapphic duet for Oxana Panchenko and Amy Hollingsworth, barely distinguishable one from the other in gym knickers and vests which, in the course of their rubber-limbed convulsions, kept threatening to ruck up over their breasts. I'm sure this was deliberate."

haha in the interview i'm proofing the choreographer is all, oh ppl tht it wz about two women having sex, but NO WAY d00d, the thought never entered my head

ha, whenever I make fun of modern dance I do that convulsion thing