Name:
Course:
Lecturer:
Date:
Dance Concerts
Critique
The first dance concert is concerned with the movement and storytelling. The concert has concentrated on duets, whereby the couples tell their story and express their emotions through dance. There is a lot of hand and feet movement in the first dance piece. The second dance piece involves a lot of body movement. However, in all the dances, the dancing couples aim to make moves that complement each other. Their moves involve a lot of pushing and pulling. In the second concert, one story takes place throughout all the dances. There are different dancers. Sometimes, the focus is on a single individual and sometimes the focus changes to a larger group. The dancing styles are different. The main intention is to demonstrate a young woman’s story beginning from her happy life as a party life to a sad and confused life that involves drugs. The final story shows the woman as she picks up her life.
The dances fit together to tell a story. The first concert tells the story of relationships. People in a relationship go through a range of moments and emotions that involve rejection and misunderstanding as well as acceptance, love, and joy. The dances demonstrate this. The second concert also aims to tell a story. However, the story is also about the different relationships that the young woman experiences. These relationships involve her friends, her intimate relationship, as well as her relationship with drugs.
Dance is a form of communication in which a person’s entire life story can be condensed in a few minutes. The communication in dance can serve different purposes including informing, persuading, advising, warning, instructing, and teaching. The dancers are free to express themselves in different ways. This highlights the importance of the different dance genres. The duet dance involving Shia and Maggie is different in technique and presentation from the Move Together dance. However, both of them express a situation in a relationship.
Comparison
There are several similarities between the dances in my concert and the ones in the other concerts. The first similarity concerns the free choice in the selection of dance. The dancers in the concerts use diverse techniques and they focus on different genres. Even in dances appearing in the same genre such as hip-hop, the dances vary significantly. In the first dance in my concert, a solo artist performs skillfully to a hip-hop routine. Although he is entertaining, he does not make it so obvious. In the hip-hop routine in the duet concert involving Keone and Mariel, the dancers perform different hip-hop routine involving different techniques. This highlights the freedom involved in dance.
Another similarity is that dances can be entertaining yet at the same time educational. They can offer light moments that make the audiences happy, but they can also highlight sad and serious moments. Another similarity is that dancers choose to perform to music. The music can be instrumental such as the ballerina dance in my concert or it can be recorded and performed, such as most of the music in the hip-hop routines.
Differences
There are some differences between my concert and the others. The first concert chose to concentrate on relationships and this is evident because all the dances involve duets. The second concert concentrated on relationships as well but the relationships featured were very diverse. However, my concert was not particularly concerned with relationships, but on the modern day dance. The dance does not necessarily have to be a story between two people or a narration about a person’s life. It can be just be entertaining and skillful without necessarily instructing the audience.
Another difference is that my genres varied significantly in terms of the techniques employed. The first dance involving a solo performer seems relatively easy but it is skillful and it involves a lot of practice. The second dance involving the ballerina is also skillful and the dancer has to work for a long time to master her technique. However, the first solo performer focuses on showing the audience how they can incorporate dance into their daily movements, such as picking something from the ground. It dispels the notion that dance has to be highly specific to a single audience or place.
Reflection
My perceptions on dance have differed significantly since I began learning about it. I enjoyed dance as a form of movement and as an interesting and engaging form of entertainment. However, I was not fully aware of how much dance can accomplish especially in terms of communicating to the audience. The first objective of dance is entertainment. However, instruction and teaching are also important. Performers can communicate with each other even as they entertain and communicate with the audience. My reflections have also changed because I have seen the many diverse ways that people can incorporate dance in their daily routines. A single move such as bending can result to a very entertaining dance move. It is all in the way the performer chooses to see the dance. Dancers have to seize all opportunities to create new moves. They do not have to spend a lot of time doing this. They can look at their surroundings and take advantage of the opportunities there.