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BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play
Friday, 1 December 2017 22:15Camille A Brown Dance Company
I don't think I've ever seen a contemporary dance performance entirely by Black women before. That's not entirely true. I've seen duets, and I've seen pieces that were performed as part of a larger evening. But five Black women dancing, and that's the night? I don't think so.
I was in a very bad mood when I saw this. I felt hot and uncomfortable. And the was a group of people who seemed to be unwrapping an entire fucking candy store as soon as the lights went down.
But I loved it anyway.
The movement vocabulary was drawn from pay ground games, from imitating 90s music videos, from that period starting when you're 12 and you keep moving your buddy around to see what it can do now.
There were parts with people trying on being sexy, parts where they were pushing each other to move with intricacy and complexity, and parts that were just about moving in unison, being together.
There was a middle section that gave me flashbacks to middle school and that time my friendship with a girl totally fell apart and I didn't know why and I couldn't make it better.
The music was interesting, somewhere on the border of art music and prog rock. It occasionally quoted pop music, but it wasn't pop music at all. The musicians danced heavy with their feet and we sometimes part of the score.
The part of the staging I found most interesting was the mirrors mounted at angles high above the stage, almost in the lights.
The dancers didn't interact with them, and they weren't really angled for the audience to see a lot in them. It made me think about CCTV and how everything we do is hypervisible, but I don't know if that was intended.
I don't think I've ever seen a contemporary dance performance entirely by Black women before. That's not entirely true. I've seen duets, and I've seen pieces that were performed as part of a larger evening. But five Black women dancing, and that's the night? I don't think so.
I was in a very bad mood when I saw this. I felt hot and uncomfortable. And the was a group of people who seemed to be unwrapping an entire fucking candy store as soon as the lights went down.
But I loved it anyway.
The movement vocabulary was drawn from pay ground games, from imitating 90s music videos, from that period starting when you're 12 and you keep moving your buddy around to see what it can do now.
There were parts with people trying on being sexy, parts where they were pushing each other to move with intricacy and complexity, and parts that were just about moving in unison, being together.
There was a middle section that gave me flashbacks to middle school and that time my friendship with a girl totally fell apart and I didn't know why and I couldn't make it better.
The music was interesting, somewhere on the border of art music and prog rock. It occasionally quoted pop music, but it wasn't pop music at all. The musicians danced heavy with their feet and we sometimes part of the score.
The part of the staging I found most interesting was the mirrors mounted at angles high above the stage, almost in the lights.
The dancers didn't interact with them, and they weren't really angled for the audience to see a lot in them. It made me think about CCTV and how everything we do is hypervisible, but I don't know if that was intended.