Textual Analysis Of A Dance Concert

The Falling Into Pieces Dance Concert performed March 25, 2007 was a blend of five distinct dances, each communicating a different message through the use of varying choreography and stage production arrangements. The concert’s opener Gasp depicts a resistance to bounds that hold one down. It’s All About Falling, the second piece, dealt with the concept of a transition from struggle and anguish to hope. The third dance piece, titled Holding Still, Tracing Past Moments, attempted to explore an abstract situation with key compositional motives that are continually repeated. Through the use of choreography, music, and props the graduate dance group performance expressed a mixture of what could be in the broader picture emotional experiences that individuals experience in their lives.
Gasp, choreographed by Dana Berk, created an effect of suffocation and struggling to break the bounds that inflict restriction. The use of heavy gasping and panting for air in the opening video clip serves as a device to take the audience into the moment; in allowing the viewing of a woman who appears to be trapped, the viewer is thus eased into and allowed to share in the emotional sensations the woman undergoes. Partaking in this consciousness of moving violently, thrashing and skirmishing
For example, this is shown through intertwining of the dancers while traveling through the space. These dancers are separating themselves and spaces between them by variations between soloist and group. A motif in this dance is that the dancers will be located together staggered upstage right facing away from the audience and drifting between each other like fluttering leaves in the wind. During these scenes, an illusion and feeling of lightness is