By snoadmin
Dance, like all art forms, should be for everyone. The beauty of art is that is should speak to the audience, regardless of their level of expertise in the arts, about what it means to be human. At the very least, audiences should leave a dance concert feeling entertained.
The Fall 2011 Faculty Dance Concert, choreographed by Cal State Long Beach dance faculty, was held at the Martha B. Knoebel Dance Theater last week. The concert was held in honor of Susan McLain, a former dance professor at CSULB and principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, who died in August.
The first act, which only consisted of three pieces, was nearly an hour long. All dances can always be shorter,. Many of the pieces were abstract and had no theme. Having a piece be solely movement-based is fine, but if you’re going that route then your movement and music better be really interesting. Sadly, many of the pieces seemed to blend together.
During the second act of the show, a video featuring interviews with McLain and clips of her choreographic works were shown. During one interview, McLain said that her objective as a choreographer was to, “Have each piece be different… and not to bore the audience to death.”
Happily, several pieces in the show most definitely did not “bore the audience to death.”
The show opened with “Side by Side” by Sophie Monet. This was a contemporary ballet piece and it stood out in a sea of modern dance. This piece appeared to be abstract, but it was a pleasure to sit back and enjoy the simple beauty of the choreography and the dancers’ artistry. Monet made use of mirroring in this piece, along with using the dancers’ bodies to create interesting geometric shapes. The dancers executed some spectacular lifts during the sections with partner work. The piece ended tenderly as one dancer rested her head on her partner’s shoulder.
“Podcast” by John Pennington, a dance professor at CSULB, was also entertaining, although it felt like two completely different dances merged into one. For the first half of “Podcast,” the dancers performed to different podcasts from the self-help genre. It was interesting to see how words, instead of music, dictated the movement and the mood.
During a podcast called “Anxiety Slayer” the dancers did yoga-like movements, and in another piece called “Lisa Love,” the dancers moved like provocative robots and stuck out their chests as Lisa Love implored women to use their cleavage to attract men. Then, the voices of all the different podcasts garbled together and the dancers moved quickly and erratically.
It seemed like this was the end of the piece, and it would have been a fitting ending. Instead, a woman came on stage and rapped and the dancers continued. She wasn’t always loud enough to hear but phrases like “sticks and stones may break my bones” and “we sing for power” could barely be understood. No one wants to hear clean rap unless it’s a joke, and clean rap paired with modern dance is pretty awkward to watch. It could be argued that the first section of the dance was about being unhappy with yourself and the second part was about finding self-acceptance. Still, the two parts just didn’t seem to fit very well.
In the second act, “Dreaming Op. 15 No. 3” by Keith Johnson, associate professor of dance, appeared to tell the story of forbidden love, specifically gay and lesbian love. The piece followed two couples that were both on the stage for the entire piece. Two women in Victorian gowns stood on an antique carpet with gold frames hanging above. Across the stage were two men on a patch of grass, staring at each other while wearing nothing but their underwear.
The movement was very pedestrian with some dance technique thrown in for good measure. The piece ended with the men making out and the women holding hands, looking at each other longingly but not daring to do more. This piece was interesting, but it was very distracting to try to watch two separate storylines that never interacted. It also wasn’t clear what the exact storyline was for either set of characters.
The CSULB department of dance, in conjunction with the McLain family, has created the Susan McLain scholarship fund in order to preserve her legacy at CSULB. Interested donors should e-mail Sylvia.Rodriguez@csulb.edu.
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