Yale Project O Elizabeth Edouard DANC 0163

I enjoyed the reading for today as it offered a new perspective. As opposed to the writing of an anthropologist or historian, this collaborative piece was written by dancers as well as students in dramaturgy. They have a much wider spectrum of views and are able to offer in my opinion a more insightful and even critical perspective. It is interesting to read about the process of putting up such a show and the way that everyone involved grew and developed his or her ideas throughout the process. The idea that we need to know where we come from to move on was discussed last Wednesday in class, and is brought up in this article through their theme of “Don’t look back!”. The importance of the origins and the history of a dance are significant as there are normally multiple influences that are simultaneously reflected through different body movements. The authors explain that in the teachings of dances from the 1950s/1960s, the students were tended to juxtapose their contemporary social dancing with the older dances. This occurrence can be explained by the near unfeasibility of erasing prior knowledge, and in this case the ‘multicultural world’ in which the students were raised contributed to the their movements.

For this project, allowing all parts of the body, not only the brain to take part in the exploration of topics such as the civil rights movement and segregation resulted in the deeper growth of many of the students. It was interesting to read about the difficulty the students had when they were asked to perform as though segregation still existed. While the students were aware of this period of time historically and were able to capture it in their mind, their lack of first hand experience prevented them from being able to portray it through their body. While reading this section, I began to question the authenticity of all older dances that we perform… As many dances that exist today stem from a social movement, in performances today, do dancers give them justice or does their lack of personal experience in certain cases hinder the performance? Does each dancer when performing adapt the dance to reflect not only the origins of the dance, but his or her own origins- leading to the creation of new dances that are influenced by even more cultures and periods of time?