One of the exercises Ondrej gave us today in the morning had to do with response. We split into groups of two: one person would lay still on the ground while the other one would gently touch different body parts, which had to then become the point from which the laying person would initiate their movement. I remember that the moment Ondrej told us to start, I looked at the way Ophelia was laying on the floor and had a very clear image in my head of how I wanted her pose to change. However, whenever I tried to “guide” her into different movements, she would always move in a very different way that I had foreseen: she would either move in a different direction, wouldn’t move as much as I wanted her to, or would move too much than I had intended her to. In the moment, it was a bit frustrating – it seemed like I was unable to communicate what I wanted to see. However, upon reflection, it makes me think about the idea of dancers being material rather than marionettes for the choreographer. Even if Ophelia wanted to truthfully follow my lead, she could never become a blank canvas. Our life experiences shape us in different ways and turn us into who we are, which is impossible for a person to undo.

We spent the first part of Trajal’s section reading a recent new article about Hector Extravaganza and the dynamic life inside the ball scene. A discussion followed, which lead me to wonder how modern appropriations (appreciations?) of the vogue culture are affecting the community itself. I was very surprised about the answer I got from Trajal to my question about the recent emergence of tv series that turn vogue competitions into video entertainment. I guess I was expecting him to talk about a form of exploitation – after all, people are taking something that was integral to the LGBTQ community as a form of expression and turning it into a profitable business – yet Trajal’s answer, simply put, was that the voguers are fine as long as they get paid. This unexpected answer reminded me that some art forms/movements arise not because someone wanted to express some deeply political, sophisticated idea, but simply because life lead them on to do it. It made me reconsider the constant presence of unexpectedness in the art world – no one really knows what the next big movement is going to be. This links back to today’s reading from K. Profeta’s book, where she discussed how sometimes, through research, people in the dance world come across things that are too new to be classified, or that can only be recognized as new in retrospect.

Today’s discussion with professor Debra Levine revolved largely around the topic of appropriation. One of the ideas that Ondrej brought up in this class got me thinking for the rest of the day: the idea that there is no clear origin of any cultural phenomena, that inter-cultural exchanges move in a cyclical manner, borrowing and offering different various concepts to each other. He used the example of K-pop, which is a famously known Korean genre of music. However, even though it would always be classified as “Korean”, and even though American attempts to incorporate the style into their own musical culture is looked down upon as a form of appropriation, the genre cannot be isolated as coming solely from Korea – it was greatly influenced by the American pop culture itself, as well as the general trend of boy bands.