Apologies, readers, for the tumbleweeds that have meandered across this URL these last few days. What with all this going on yesterday, and the fact that my boyfriend and I decided to rearrange our entire house–not to mention, you know, work–I’ve been a little tied up. However! Today you get this juicy morsel, a belated Times roundup, and some hot new links in the sidebar, so quit your bellyaching.
What you see above is a teaching video for Sweet Pea, choreographed by Gloria Johnson to the song “Honey, I’m Home” by Shania Twain (for extra credit, drink in all the genius lyrics here). It’s just one gem I discovered whilst perusing the blog-as-project This Dance Is A Cliché, the tongue-in-cheek brainchild of artist Sarah Dahnke. Not afraid to love, Dahnke and I are of like minds when it comes to acknowledging the innumerable traps and pitfalls of progressively-aimed vocabulary generation and composition as innumerable gifts, perfect nuggets of a wholesome and easy joy. Each dance cliché, after all, was born at some point or another: Can you imagine being in the room at the precise moment that the kick-line was invented? Is it possible to know, when George Balanchine inserted a grand plié in second position en pointe into some early ballet (oh but readers, which one?), whether he could have forseen its greedy, ostensibly-edgy inclusion in almost every cut-rate ballet made in the last 50 years that considers itself to be “contemporary” or–shudder–postmodern? There is no way to know, but that forced-arch plié endures nonetheless, and will live on in perpetuity as The Step That Thought It Was Fierce, a Little Engine That Could on a track going nowhere. Nancy Garcia, a consummate blogger herself, recently nabbed Dahnke for an interview that spans a multitude of subjects including (but not limited to) Rahm Emanuel, Miranda July, and T-shirts. Check it out, and hey: If there’s a move you love to do, at least partially because you’ve seen it a million times, then by all means take her up on the invitation.
(via Dance Advantage)
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i vote for the flowy garmented, tribal drum soundtracked “arms up with high kick and fall into side roll.” if i see that again i’ll el-oh-el in the modern dance theatre.
By: thinkpinkradio on 01:21::2009
at 23:48
Thanks for the mention. It’s a great project. During my college years the most over used movement in choreography was the body swing into that doubled-over jump. So much so, in fact, that my non-dancer husband picked up on it! Also, young choreographers have a penchant for angsty “drug” or “madness” dances.
By: danceadvantage on 01:22::2009
at 00:12
Oooh that is a FANTASTIC cliché you mention in your write-up. We all have one that drives us mad, and what I’m finding is that everyone’s cliché centers around a different movement or idea. I love that.
Thanks so much for the love! Great to see it coming from Chi-boogie (my former city).
-Sarah (thisdanceisacliche.com)
By: unforbiddendances on 01:22::2009
at 00:27
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By: Believe the hype! « This Dance is a Cliché on 02:18::2009
at 05:42