Always a Second Option

With each day I feel like I get more and more out of Ondrej’s class. I start to feel new sensations in my muscles, especially when we did the ball under the back exercise for warming up.  It’s like you try to make the ball become a natural part of your body and not an impediment that keeps you from laying down; you try to shape your back muscles after the ball’s shape, almost like in a fluid manner. This way, I felt all my back relieved from a tension that maybe has been there many days. During the final group exercise, I felt the same as in the first day of partner dance exercise. You are faced with something unknown and there is not the same fast reaction to changes in movement or the same ease in walking; those build upon repetition – I feel like we’re going to be more coherent as a group the next day we repeat this exercise, just like how different were the two experiences of partner dance one day after another. And the second-option exercise – because of it I chose the today’s keyword ‘self-consciousness’ – made me question my ‘realness’ every time I made a step; is this first thought my real intention, or subconsciously the real intention of my body is the second thought? What if the second thought is ‘artificial’ too?

Performing the Dances in a Postmodernist Manner

For me, the highlight of Trajal’s class was when we all performed our pieces simultaneously. Even if we weren’t conscious of each other’s movements, I felt like there was some sort of unity in what we did because of the style in which we represented it. I noticed that something changed while I stood back and seen the performances by myself;  the action unfolding before my eyes let me view the piece in a new perspective and helped me polish my own piece and ideas. Now I understand how important is that, whatever role you have in a production, it’s essential to experience it in all the ways – to dance it as a dramaturg, to watch and analyze even as a dancer.

 

Goals in Art

In today’s lecture, I was really interested in putting the postmodernist approach next to the classical dramaturgical approach and comparing them. It is not about liking or not liking a piece, or by staying truthful to the entire text, not even it is about Aristotle’s catharsis. I have been familiarized with these concepts of approaching art in my visual art classes, so when we started talking about what postmodernism means now and how these movements from the second half of the twentieth century revolutionized the art world it seemed so natural to analyse a piece of work not by the filters I mentioned earlier (liking, catharsis, staying true to the text, etc) that seem at hand oftentimes. Giving a verdict is not even the final goal in observing art. The goal is the whole process itself of looking for something that strikes you or finding how is that piece interesting and reflecting on it, tying it to other references and creating a network of meaning. I look forward to seeing Trajal’s approach to the text and what are the other influences that he is going to incorporate is his body of work.