By snoadmin
If Cal State Long Beach’s Department of Dance’s “Four Frames From the Wide Floating Ground” had been part of a dance competition, it wouldn’t have won anything. It was an inconsistent mixture of good and bad performances.
“Four Frames” was a combination of four separate performances as part of four graduate choreographers’ theses. Graduate students Jenilyn Brown, Renee Murray, Sara Pfeifle and Sarah Wilbur devised their own choreography projects. These students used dancers from the dance department as tools to present their work.
The first performance was a five-minute documentary film, “Here Comes Everybody: A Wide Sky Dance Project.”
Wilbur used this approach to answer her question, “Is there a small dance in everybody?” Wilbur wanted to observe how the interaction between dancers and the audience influenced choreography.
Next, cheery-faced dancers appeared on stage as colorful moving shapes, controlling their arms and legs with very sharp movements that matched the contemporary dance style. At the end the dancers earned a huge applause from the excited audience.
“I liked the show, because I’m a dance major,” freshman Amanda Corrigan said. “I appreciate what they do.”
The dance presentation took a nose dive into boredom and annoyance with screeching balloon sounds in “Will It Float?” choreographed by Murray. Audience members would want to take a restroom break to get away from the screeching sound when the dancers rubbed on the balloons.
One of the dancers looked ridiculous when she repeatedly hit a balloon on a string with her head across the stage. It didn’t help the show at all when other dancers joined in this pointless activity. The way the dancers fell down to the floor made them appear as if they were suffering from belly aches or were dying.
It became more nonsensical when the dancers froze on stage after the music suddenly stopped and the dancers remained frozen for a few minutes. Then out of the blue, the dancers started running around on stage playing tag, which made them look like foolish children.
“1, 2, 3 and jump!” the dancers said in unison as they jumped across imaginary lines on stage a few times.
After the six dancers sat on the floor, each holding a balloon, one of them got up and gathered all of the balloons. When all the other dancers left the stage, this dancer slowly let go of the balloons one by one after doing the same choreography over and over including rubbing the balloon with his hand, which was annoying and redundant in addition to the horrible screeching sound.
“I did not like the balloon show,” freshman Breanna Bruett, a business major, said. “I found it irritating.”
Pfeifle’s “Know One” was slightly better than “Will It Float?” In this performance, the dancers appeared a bit more alive as they talked and danced. Their muscles appeared very prominent when they did Yoga-like movements. Anyone who has taken Yoga would know how difficult each pose is. Those dancers were able to do it within a heartbeat with no mishaps.
“I got to go home, why?” one dancer said to the audience with her hands behind her head and a funny look on her face. At times, one person would dance and talk while pairs of dancers improvised to match the dancer’s story. By and large, this performance was not very exciting. The presentation closed as the dancers sang a song together.
The last of the four performances, “Slippery When Dry” by Brown, was the climax of the show. The dancers threw water on the stage and themselves, which was reminiscent of what Blue Man Group does with paint.
It was quite a show when the soaked dancers glided across the stage on their knees and water splashed everywhere. The dancers were dressed in just rags, doing the Macarena and spinning quickly on their knees on the wet stage.
This presentation was worth waiting for and anyone would have enjoyed it.
Overall, some of the graduate choreography students should have had more feedback from their mentors before presenting their work to the public. It would be excellent if the entire show was like “Slippery When Dry,” due to the energy and creativity were at a new level.
