Sunday, November 15, 2009

Juddertone Performance a success!

Big Ape has just finished another successful performance as part of the Juddertone Performance Series at Boston University Dance Theater. The concert was an exceptionally long one and the audience has been incredibly patient for the duration and also general quality of the work in the concert....Thank you everyone who came out to see the show!
This piece is quite different comparing to Big Ape's other repertory work in the way that it doesn't have an obvious drive as the piece progresses. It maintains a specific pace throughout and at times almost hints a termination of momentum or energy, but then it picks up and keeps going...in a cycle. The work was made in pieces and usually you would imagine sections start to interweave and have meanings being done one after another. But "Away" kind of maintains that "sectionalism" in a way, pieces held close to each other only because of some inevitability of the bigger structure. I am still making sense of the work. It almost feels like it should just crumble and complete fall apart and be "disposed" at the end, somehow. How do you dispose a piece?

I was getting on the T to get back to my temporary "home" in Boston and had a rather inspiring conversation with one of the audience members about what is "modern dance." haha, of course right? what is modern dance, then, and now, and how's it changing, how's it dying. Maybe we can wrap all that has happened since the 20s until now and call it modern dance, and call what is yet to come something else? So many dance works have shifted to something close to our concepts of "experimental theater." But that seems to me only a way to escape thinking about what is the kind of work that we don't consider dance now? Why? Can we categorize them in more specific and informed ways than one large "easy-to-go" category of experimental theater? of course, i think modern dance pieces still need to be movement-based to be called dance. Theatricality is one of the ways to say what you wanna say, but i do think only if the movement itself makes a statement that a piece can be a dance. It seems to me so interesting that each audience member has a "line" through which they judge/ or categorize whether a piece is "dance" or not.

5 comments:

The Politics of Shoes said...

The concert was an exceptionally long one and the audience has been incredibly patient for the duration and also general quality of the work in the concert

Is this an insult? Rather ungracious of you.

Jane Wang
one of the co-producers of Juddertone

The Politics of Shoes said...

However I did enjoy your discussion about theater and dance, part of a larger discussion about performance and performance art...

Peace.

yina ng said...

well, rather than saying it as a subjective personal opinion as an insult (which I had no interest in doing considering I was part of the concert), I was almost quoting directly from what I've heard from the audience so far. I am sorry if the comment offended you as one of the co-producers of the program. I did appreciate the work and effort that have been put into producing the concert. But we can't deny the fact that the audience did feel that was a long concert (it was almost 2 hours), and they did find it difficult to enjoy some of the work in there but still sat through the whole thing. Rather than taking it personally, let's hear that public opinion and think about it objectively.
peace.

yina ng said...

thanks for dropping by my blog, btw. hope you see you again.

The Politics of Shoes said...

Hello Yina Ng,

Thank you for clarifying your original post.

I misunderstood and thought it was a little peculiar that you would be slamming your fellow participants in the show. Yes we the co-producers realized the show was too long this year, it was difficult to force all the participants to cut their pieces down to the required 15 minutes. If we are able to produce Juddertone in 2010 (we the co-producers funded the entire series ourselves in 2009 and can not afford to continue if we receive no outside funding), we plan to only select four or five pairs.

Good luck with your future projects,

Peace.

Yina Ng Dance

Yina Ng Video