HRDC

This past weekend, hollins dance/hrdc attended the American College Dance Festival at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. While we were there, I attended (along with effie bowen & hanna miller) a dance writing/critique workshop with the NYC based dance critic, Elizabeth Zimmer. The workshop was super exciting and informative and gave me a much better understanding of the confines and possibilities within writing a dance review. For the class, we were required to write a 300 word review of a performance we saw at ACDFA. I failed this assignment miserably - rather than writing an actual review, I wrote more of an acdfa manifesto/rant. Regardless, I think it has some value so I thought I would share. Hopefully, Effie & Hanna will post their reviews as well so you can see the multiple approaches we took to the assignment & the festival.

here goes nothing…

This is not a dance review
by Lauren Grace Bakst

As a visceral, embodied, ephemeral form, one might expect dance to be experiential in its nature, however, I left the ACDFA adjudicated concert on Thursday afternoon feeling the exact opposite. Most if not all of the works I witnessed dealt with dance as a representational form rather than an experiential one. Whether it was the young woman in “All That Remains” pounding the floor with her fists or the woman in white running in a panic across the stage in “We’ll Prey For Her,” the representation of “struggle” was a popular thread. While I know this is what “struggle” looks like, I wondered if the choreographers had ever questioned what “struggle” might feel like.

There seems to be an unknown authority in college dance programs across the United States telling everyone but me the rules of how to make a “good” dance. Throw in a cartwheel, a lift or two, an impossible leap where the performer aims to touch their toes to their head in the air, some cinematic music, and you’ve got yourself a “good” dance. The problem with these rules is that the performers are so concerned with “getting it,” achieving that jump, that leap, that lift, they don’t get the chance to experience their bodies, and therefore I might as well be watching a television, a two dimensional representation of something that is ontologically multidimensional. Never having received the rule book, I was confused by these repeating motifs and the generalized concepts the various choreographers attempted to convey: relationship? personal struggle? power? the value or absurdity of a trough?

WHY DO YOU MAKE DANCES? WHAT DO YOU CARE ABOUT IN YOUR LIFE, IN THE WORLD? HOW DOES THAT MANIFEST WITHIN AND THROUGH BODIES?

it’s time to make a new rule book.