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THE NEXT BIG THING IN DANCE

3/11/2013

 
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OAKLAND, CA, STREET DANCERS
      The Next Shape-Shifting Big Thing in Dance
    Twyla Tharp, a MacArthur choreography "genius grant” recipient, speaking on the Dick Cavett Show, said, “Which technique you use isn’t important. We use ballet.”
    Tharp, a choreographic genius, was shooting from the hip—and she missed. Dance techniques rise from human experience, reflect it, and are not really interchangeable. Classical ballet, from kingly courts, strove to assure lords and ladies that they were more than mere mortals. Baratya Natyam and other Indian forms reflect a rich mythology. Spanish Dance projects a conqueror’s steely machismo. The Royal Watutsi danced in sensuous synchrony with the Earth. Jazz is a flashy hybrid of Irish step dancing and African rhythms.
    Martha Graham’s technique projects her struggles with the soul. Merce Cunningham ventures into implacable serenity. Erick Hawkins blends with creation. Alwin Nikolais peers through an infinite kaleidoscope. Jack Cole captures the impersonal power of the machine age. Doris Humphrey, Jose Limon and Alvin Ailey evoke aspects of Everyman.
    Dance pundits dubbed the last Big Thing, “Modern Dance,” embraced by fiercely creative second and third generations: Merce Cunningham, Jose Limon, Hanya Holm, Alvin Ailey, Anna Sokolow, Pearl Primus, Erick Hawkins. Some wobbly experiments encouraged them to pontificate about “Post-Modern,” but the real practitioners soon saw beyond it and went on to produce forceful dances not post anything.
    Today’s next Big Thing is out there already seen by millions, the street form called “breaking.” From its reputed origins on the streets of Harlem and Spanish Harlem it spread into the world. Some fragments can be detected in the pop TV show, So You Think You Can Dance, but are swallowed up by banal shake-your-ass kick-over-your-head trash.
     Dance as a theater art needs what break-people are inventing—a new vocabulary that looks like no other and glistens with theater potential. (Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey would have grabbed it.) Dancers on the streets and in studios are learning the moves even while they create new ones, and a few institutions, the American Dance Festival for one, hires them to teach it.
    Will it attract masters like Bill T. Jones and Robert Battle, or will it take some young genius to recognize and capture these eerie, other worldly, de-constructed, re-constructed moves with their creaturely physicality, black hole intensity, elusive grace-under-pressure mystery that bursts out of their bodies and strains through confining skin? Can it be tamed, codified, taught in dance classes, given to the world, made into stage or TV or Internet choreography, the next shape-shifting Big Thing?  Will it generate dances inspired by dark energy, string theory, solar flares, global warming, rising oceans, life on Mars, asteroids on collision orbits with Earth? It’s already worldwide. Click the link for a short clip taken on the streets of Oakland, CA. Street Dancers of Oakland, CA

dancer
3/12/2013 04:59:01 am

really interesting stu,
hard to know ? its a folk form as well as a response to the music of rapp....so it fits into the category of social dancing : micheal jackson was able to integrate both, although it wasn't rapp or hip hop- but a popular blend; if its technically built, its just as effective as jazz dance as a popular form "of moves"...but, as moderndance, it lacks cohesive individuality of vision, through a personal vocabulary....but in its basic message, contains socio/economic as well as political ramifications of lifestyle and philosophy...when combined with the serious artist in either music or dance, its revealing as a glimpse into the collective soul of a race and its grievances and joys.........?

urbisoler
3/12/2013 07:04:29 am

Favorite dance films and/or sequences:
The Red Shoes.
West Side Story
An American in Paris
Shall We Dance? (Japanese version)
The tango in Scent of a Woman.
Fred and Ginger
Fred & Eleanor Powell in Broadway Melody of 1940
The Turning Point??
etc.


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    Author (Yuma, AZ, 1944)

    Being 90 years in this world,  with great kids,  great grandkids, great wives (two, one at a time) and great memories, I wonder why some people seem to have stopped loving the U.S.A.? I will wonder in print right here. If you wonder too, or can provide some answers, please comment.
                                   Stuart Hodes

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           With my friend, Nero.
                   April, 2012.
        Photo by Ray Madrigal

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