Posted on August 4th, 2002 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Dance.
I've been interested in modern dance since getting acquainted with Pilobolus and Mark Morris. So Velma pulled out an old tape of Alvin Ailey.
It was incredibly frustrating. Not because of the dance pieces; the two by Ailey seemed to be great, and one of the others, a disco-drug drama, was dated enough to be mildly amusing. The frustrating part was the director. When recording a dance piece for posterity, the director's job is to be transparent; I ought to never be aware of the director and his choices. Unless it is a collaboration between the choreographer and the director, the director is not there to be an artist, he's there to be a window.
This director seemed determined to contribute something, to highlight the experience. To that end, he constantly jumped in for close-ups and changed angles on the dancers. This disrupted my appreciation in two ways:
First, he frequently chose individuals in a company or even a body part of an individual to focus on to the exclusion of all else. In doing so, he made a decision both for the choreographer and for me; what I focus on ought to be my choice, subject to the subtle manipulations of the choreographer. When I choose to focus on one element in dance, I always try to remain aware of the other things going on; not only did this director not allow that, but he didn't allow me to focus on one thing the first time and something else the second time, which ought to be one of the main benefits of having the thing on tape!
Second, and crucially, he changed angles and jumped in or back in the middle of moves, all the time! Granted that if you're going to cut, it's hard to find natural breaks in the dance -- a good reason not to do it at all -- but even so, his primary place to cut seemed to be on the beat of the music. Since the relationship of the moves to the beat tends to be more subtle than that, those cuts were ham-handed. And every time he cut in the middle of a move, it destroyed the move for me. In that moment of having to refocus, I lost the line, the grace, the flow of every move. That flow is the heart of the beauty! It was gone! It was like being hit in the head with little hammers that made my eyes close at random intervals! He did this no less in the beautiful solo piece, Cry, than in the ensemble pieces! Auuuuuugh!
So I think I might really like Alvin Ailey; but I'm not sure. That Dudley Williams sure can dance, though.
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