Rant, Rave, and Pity Party (not necessarily in that order)

A new day, a new quarter–after Winter quarter’s character-building experience (and I needed so much more character…) I am on to a fun and not-as-crazy Spring quarter. If only it were Spring quarter in Seattle–here’s the lovely University of Washington campus during spring:

But alas, I’m in Columbus, OH (moment of silence while I fondly remember my UW days…)

Ok, the pity party is over: one of the fun things about this quarter is continuing Labanotation, and the geek-frissons of delight the class gives me. We are centering the class around learning the Parsons Etude from the American Dance Legacy Institute. The Etude is a medley of his choreography and typical movement phrases that he put together into a 4-minute piece. It seemed like a good idea to work on when watching it on videotape, but it turns out that it’s kind of hard too–tricky how that works.

Anyway, it’s one of several pieces available from ADLI that come in a package of video, music, notation, performance rights and so on for $100 or less. I can’t give ADLI enough praise for making accessible the work of choreographers like Jose Limon and Donald McKayle–no huge fee, no special permissions needed, just buy the package and start dancing! A lot of people talk plaintively about the need to preserve dance’s past, and bemoan the lack of historical knowledge on the part of today’s dance students–but ADLI is actually doing something about it. I wish there were more efforts like this in the dance world, but we tend to be such control freaks that the idea of letting choreography go out into the wide world without supervision tends to freak us out. At least it’s a start! Through ADLI, dance students are getting first-hand experience of wonderful works and choreographers, and even if they aren’t performing the pieces like professional dancers would, the sky hasn’t fallen… Dare I suggest that more choreographers/holders-of-a-choreographer’s-copyright take this example as impetus to get over their own preciousness and just get their work out there?!

(But meanwhile I am grumpy about having to hold that balance for counts 4-5-6. Mean ol’ David Parsons!)

Things I’ve written in school, part 3

Ok, this is it for the moment. Another paper from Karen Eliot’s history class. It has a bibliography AND footnotes–I’m in grad school folks!

(I’d love to hear comments on any of these papers–and feel free to post up fabulous inspiring writings!)

Paul Taylor’s Esplanade: Illuminatory Locomotion[1]

The history of dance during the 20^th century in America is a fascinating story of questioning and experimentation. Early in the century, pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham questioned the supposed artificialness of ballet, and experimented with creating new ways of moving, in the process establishing the field of modern dance. As the century progressed, so did this process of questioning and experimentation, within ballet and modern dance both. But while the field’s practitioners might differ from their predecessors in methods, aesthetic values, movement vocabulary, and so on, successive generations of artists did not essentially differ from each other in their base worldview. That dance movement was another sort of movement, elevated beyond the movements of everyday life even if sometimes echoing them, was an unquestioned assumption.

Until the 1960’s.

Things I’ve written in school, part B

This is a paper I wrote this quarter for Karen Eliot’s 20th Century Dance History class, another great course (but part of what made it a nutty quarter!)  A quick thank you to her and my peer reviewers for their feedback!

(And this paper is complete with scholarly references and stuff–I’m really in school!  The bibliography is at the end.  Which is a better place than in the middle, I guess.)

Mirthful Martha

            There are people known for being light-hearted and funny, always good for a laugh.  Martha Graham was not one of them. 

Things I’ve written in school, part I

I’ve decided to be brave and post some things that I’ve written over the last two quarters. I’d also like to invite you to post (or send to me to post) things you have written that you like, or things you have read that you think should be shared.

That’s right folks, we’re dancers and we read and think… Shocking!

This first paper I’m posting was written last quarter for Candace Feck’s wonderful Dance Criticism and Aesthetics class.

Absence:

Or, Why I am Dancing

The absence of a thing can be more striking than its presence. The emptiness left behind takes on form; reveals in sharper definition what had been there; shows the web of relations, assumptions, desires, which are noisy in their silence.

What dedication–or something…

So I made it through classes in this crazy 24-credit quarter of mine, I am now diligently working away at final papers and projects (well, not quite at the moment), gleefully anticipating the end of the quarter, all the while wondering “why me?!”  You see, Columbus is having a magnificent snowstorm, with piled up drifts of several feet of beautiful fluffy white snow, the likes of which I never experienced growing up in Seattle.  All I want to do is bundle up and go outside to flop into drifts and make snow angels, and get snowflakes on my nose and eyelashes, and turn my cheeks rosy, and come inside to warm up with hot chocolate, and then go out and do it all over again!

But back to my paper on Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet–it’s a marvelous book with amazing photographs, check it out!