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I'm really excited by the vocabulary of this evening's work, even more than Friday's Black Girl.
Dance vocabulary, the way I think of it, is made up of the actual motions, the ways the motions are transitioned between (which are still motions, I know), and the attitude/intentionality with which the motions are made.
There's a fair amount of concert dance that's hip hop or that draws on hip hop vocabulary and inflections. But there's more to popular American black gestural language than hip hop, and this performance drew on the breadth of it. There were people walking with swagger and standing up on each other and falling back, but, not necessarily in an acting way. They were drawing on these gestures as movements, as pieces of movement vocabulary from which you could make art dance.
It reminded me of Paul Taylor's Esplanade, not that the pieces resembled each other, but that it was building art dance out of ordinary movement.
I found the piece really exciting and I would have liked to watch it again. I sincerely hope the Kennedy Center invites the company back. Ms. Brown did mention Friday that they already had engagements for Black Girl through 2019, so we shall see.
Dance vocabulary, the way I think of it, is made up of the actual motions, the ways the motions are transitioned between (which are still motions, I know), and the attitude/intentionality with which the motions are made.
There's a fair amount of concert dance that's hip hop or that draws on hip hop vocabulary and inflections. But there's more to popular American black gestural language than hip hop, and this performance drew on the breadth of it. There were people walking with swagger and standing up on each other and falling back, but, not necessarily in an acting way. They were drawing on these gestures as movements, as pieces of movement vocabulary from which you could make art dance.
It reminded me of Paul Taylor's Esplanade, not that the pieces resembled each other, but that it was building art dance out of ordinary movement.
I found the piece really exciting and I would have liked to watch it again. I sincerely hope the Kennedy Center invites the company back. Ms. Brown did mention Friday that they already had engagements for Black Girl through 2019, so we shall see.