Paper for Dance Performance

Y.G- PAGE 3/ NUMPAGES 3

Yue Gao

Section 04

About Dance—Pictograms

On April 21st, I went to Victoria J. theater to see dance performances. Before I went to see this show, I thought it might be a single show which might had specific story line. However, when I thought of the show I saw last time, I found that it might be many shows performed by seniors or other students at Mason School of the Arts, which is same to the truth. Moreover, there were 6 shows in total, and each of them had showed dancers’ excellent skills to dance and novel ideas of choreographers. What’s more, compare to other five show, I think I can understand and I appreciate more on the forth show: Pictograms, which was performed by more than 15 people. This dance change my minds about dance should be performed orderly totally. However, in this show, everyone danced by themselves,almost showed no same part with others. All in all, Pictograms is the show that I want to talk about in this paper.

In this show, I saw several interesting scenes. The first one is that at first there was only one girl who kept waking in left and then right, but no forward or back. After a while, another girl came but walk in the opposite direction as the first girl. Therefore, no doubt that they will have collision. However, none of them knew to change their direction, so they kept colliding with big momentum until other dancers came and moved them. The second interesting scene is that one girl kept jumping like a frog in a line, and colliding a man in same line, which ended when others come to change their routes of movement. In addition, in the middle of dance, a girl with yellow pants showed up, and she was the only one with pants. Others just wore underwear, which made this girl seem to be special. My attention was grabbed by her since she showed up. Most of time, she kept still, but only moved and changed poses when music began. When there was no music, she was always moved to other places by others. It seems that she was a puppet and an image, which satisfied the title of show. At last, all dancers showed up with yellow pants. Furthermore, this dance might be really hard for each dancers, especially when they need to have collision, because if they can not control their direction well, they will not collide naturally. Moreover, this dance was long, so dancers should have enough energy.

According to the brochure, “commissioned by the American Dace Festival in 2014, Pictograms explores the stage as a two-dimensional space. The viewers’ mind and eye are drawn to graphical and sculptural sensibilities as the work plays with notions of flatness, surface, and shape as it poses the question of social dimension and identity through a visual lens”(Mason Gross brochure 6). Thus, the choreographer of this dance might try to show how people move in two-dimensional space. People kept still like an image and their kept colliding can be used to show that if people move in two-dimensional space, they might always have collisions. All in all, there is no doubt that the artists are successful because they show their ideas to audiences with their dance well and audiences truly understand their targets. Moreover, for the contextual, there are some relations to the situation in the reality. In many people’s daily life, they often have different ideas toward many things, and if they kept insisting on their thought, they always have collisions with others. What’s more, if people just concentrate on surface of problems they met, and do not know how to change their ways to think, they will definitely have contradictions and have trouble solving the problems well. Similar to what this dance showed, people can always solve their problems with the help of other people, because others can change the directions they think. Therefore, this is a good show which contains excellent skills, surface meanings and deep meanings.

The choreographer of Pictograms is Netta Yerushalmy, and there are both females and males, but more women than men. Thus, the size of this show must be large groups, but I have trouble determining why there is less men than women. In addition, I do not believe that gender disability, ethnic/cultural origin or nationality are important in this dance show. The style of this dance might be modern dance, and I don’t think virtuosity is important in this show because the main purpose of this show is to tell people several important ideas with easy way—dance. The theme of this dance might be abstract because audiences need to think to find the deep meaning of this dance. Moreover, the music and silence play might use to provide dancers specific time to show specific actions and attract audiences’ attention. Furthermore, the silence before dancers are moved is the time needed to show deep meaning. Also I see space, bodies, relationship, time and energy in this show. The lighting and sets have important effects on this show because audiences can determine where to put their attention more with the movement to lights and the sets of show. Actually, there must have reasons why they choose to wear underwear first, and let a girl with pants show up. I think it might be helping audience understand show better. However, I don’t think there are much use of technology, so the technology are not so important in this show.

In a word, this is a successful show and the deep meaning of this show is obvious for me and this work engage me emotionally and intellectually, so I choose his show to write about. Moreover, this dance is choreographed in 2014, so it was a repertory piece. Moreover, the type of theater was three-quarter, and dancers only danced at the stage, never going downstairs, so this is a performance site-specific show.

• Mason Gross performing Arts Center and Galleries brochure:5-7