The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/dance/page/3/)
The following is a guest column written in response to “Dancing the Diaspora,” a review by Will Cordeiro published on Mar. 12.
I admire The Sun for many reasons and especially for its reviews of dance, music, painting, theater and the many other performances and exhibitions at Cornell. The Sun’s reviewers are serving the purposes of art in addressing the deep forces within our social and historical moment.
Over the break I was introduced to a whole genre of music and dance I had no idea existed. A friend told me about this movement called Kuduro (pronounced koo-doo-roo), which is centered in Angola, West Africa, a former Portuguese colony, and in Lisbon, where many Angolans are now living. There are conflicting stories about where the style got its name: kuduro purportedly means “hard ass” or “stiff bottom” in Portuguese, the official language of Angola. It is also said to have a meaning in the Northern Angolan language Kimbundu, but I’m not sure what that is.
Duna, the title of the dance concert presented on Tuesday night at the Schwartz Center by Kongo Ba Teria and Barker & Tarpanga Dance Project, means “foreigner” in one of the native languages of Burkina Faso, where all four of the male dancer/musicians in the troupe originally hail from. The group’s dance style is a deliberately hybridized form that appropriates traditional West African dance movements into the decidedly Western context of modern dance.
In the world of Glory and Rue: Street Dances, an imaginary bus rolls across the landscape. Dancers take their places in it: some reading, others texting. The girl at the end of the bus makes her way to the front, followed in sequence by others, who in turn are followed by others. Thus carried forward by the breathtaking, concentrated energy of its passengers, this bus sweeps across the stage like a wave. From the opposite direction, another bus approaches and passes it. It is a brief but serendipitous encounter. Prosaic, but extraordinary.
Staged at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts last weekend by the Department of Theater, Film and Dance, Glory and Rue was an exploration of that chance moment when strangers on the street collide and come together.
The social interaction between total strangers will differ slightly from that of lovers or even close friends, but how will it differ? In what ways do people look at each other or react to movement in different situations? Does the architecture of a specific area affect how people interact within its streets? The upcoming dance concert at the Schwartz Center will explore these questions as 14 student performers team up with two alumni dancers and four community members to express the movement of people in urban spaces. The performers will expose their sensitivity to physical distance and the presence or absence of touch in everyday encounters during this episodic narrative centered around the similarities and differences of interactions among people on the street.
Tragedy strove to reverse itself in Byron Suber’s dance piece, Bach Solo Cello Suite No. 1, Circa 1986. Dancers in black fell to the ground one by one, like birds shot in midair — only to rise again, flinging their skirts with a death-defying joy.
Suber’s dance piece was performed at the State Theatre last Saturday for The Ithaca Ballet’s Winter Repertory Performance alongside with pieces by other choreographers. Bach Solo Cello Suite No. 1, Circa 1986 was an exercise in contrasts.
Dancers whirled together simultaneously with a frightening vigor — producing a dizzying juxtaposition of chaos and order. Neo-classical balletic movements jostled with modern dance techniques for a place in a piece where life and death are intimately intertwined.
It took a little bit of cajoling and self-conscious laughter at first. But by the end of the evening, each time Marc Bamuthi Joseph ended a stream of rhapsodic, rhythmic poetry with “word word,” the audience, as if cued by magic, came in with their response: “word word.”
In In The Spoken World, presented by the Kitchen Theater last weekend, Bamuthi journeyed through dazzling landscape of movement and sound, in a poetic exploration of what it means to be a part of a race, a family, and a community.
I love attending dance events that support charity — not because they’re necessarily the best performances I’ve been to, but because they put dance into context. A casual audience member isn’t going to consider the history behind each dance discipline or step, but they can recognize that they’re supporting a great cause. Such an opportunity for dance appreciate occured this past Saturday, when Cornell’s Shadows Dance Troupe presented their annual fall benefit concert in Bailey Hall. All proceeds from the show went to On Site Volunteer Services, a student-run group that promotes community service.
[img_assist|nid=33690|title=Shadow Dancers|desc=Shadows Dance Troupe performs at the Fall Step 2008 concert in Bailey Hall on Saturday.|link=node|align=left|width=|height=0]
While Ithaca lacks most of the defining characteristics of a larger city — good shopping, vibrant nightlife, etc. — you don’t have to travel far from campus to find excellent performance arts. This past weekend, the Ithaca Ballet opened its 2008-2009 season with a set of matinee performances on Saturday and Sunday, downtown at the State Theatre.
[img_assist|nid=33052|title=Sooooo Pretty|desc=The Ithaca Ballet’s dancers, who opened their ’08-’09 season last weekend, wowed audiences at the State Theatre with their precision and grace.|link=node|align=left|width=|height=0]
Roland Barthes, in a famous essay in Mythologies, claims that Parisian strip-tease helps to “inoculate” the viewers from eroticism under the cover of “the alibi of Art” and the “alibi of work.” That is, the strip-tease tends to ward off any outright sexual desire by both transforming the nude body into a pristine — even plasticine — art object as well as by professionalizing the routine through “the honorable practice of specialization,” (i.e. skilled labor).