Today in Ondrej’s class I realized that dancing requires people to let it slightly more loose than usual. Some genres, such as contemporary, may require it more than others, but all dances fundamentally require a person to relax their body, distant themselves from the reality, and become somewhat of a marionette, either for a specific person – a choreographer – or for something as broad as a feeling. During the guiding/leading activity today, Ondrej was encouraging us become freer with our movements and trust the leader. In other words, he wanted us to let go of ourselves and move as the other person lead us to – he wanted us to become material for the other person to work with. I thought that it was an interesting paradox how people need to become “free” in order to follow another person, which would not traditionally entail freedom. This activity also made me consider whether dancers are ever truly free – obviously, performers are bound by the choreographer’s instructions, but I think that in many situations people are following rules or conventions even when they are trying to “break it loose.”

In Trajall’s class today one of the most important things for me was focus, especially when we were performing his choreography that we started learning yesterday. Dance requires a lot of concentration – you have to be aware of your own pose and movement, as well as the timing, the tempo, the music, your gaze and etc. I thought it was particularly interesting that it was the “neutral body” pose that precisely required this much focus to seem natural. I saw a link with the discussion of realness that occurred right before that, as we were precisely trying to create the image of something natural, even though it is more a convention of natural than actual authenticity.

The video that showed Beyonce’s Countdownmusic video side by side with Keersmaeker’s choreography got me thinking about representation and construction of meaning. Even though the two artists were using practically identical movements for their choreographies, they signified completely different ideas. Like we discussed later on, this fluidity of meaning has a lot do with the context. The discussion reminded me how important it is to understand not only the general context of an artwork, but also to situate it within a historical movement, as these are the key elements to fixinga particular meaning.