In today’s movement class, we started off with many of the same exercises that we did yesterday. Although for some this might seem irritating, it helped me by being able to compare my body and its relaxedness to yesterday. Moreover, I feel as though this repetition is extremely helpful in the sense that it builds up a routine and repertoire of exercises that we can do ourselves to warm up and relax. Also, it was not as though we did each exercise in exactly the same manner. Rather we added variations, like additional stretches and longer periods of stretching to challenge us and also relax us some more. Another variation we were given was the change of partner, the addition of the levels, and more comfort during the repeated lead/ follow exercise. I partnered up with Tori and I could feel that she was very playful with her movements, since we often followed the music and its rhythm. When we switched the second time and were allowed to use only one hand, I led Tori around in a way that would make it entertaining for her to follow, but also enjoyable to lead. This exercise made me feel as if I was directly back in ballroom dancing class again, avoiding the other dancing couples, trying out new dance steps, and sometimes bumping into each other. When Tori led me the second time, I could immediately that Ondrej took my hand and moved me around the room because of the difference in their approach to movement. Repeating the exercise with a different person requires one to immediately adapt to their hands, movement approach and body, which is why these trust exercises and ballroom dancing are so fascinating to me.

Yesterday, after I watched Paris Is Burning, I researched what happened to all the people in the movie. All except for two of the main people have died. Many due to AIDS-related illnesses and many before the 2000s. Although there are a lot of issues with the movie, such as lack of payment to the participants and possible exploitation, all the people in the movie were immortalized through it, making them continue their influence today. In addition to them as people, the general struggle of people in the ball was manifested through the portrayal of the balls themselves. The categories, like Business Man and Femme Queen Realness, represent an almost unachievable goal for people participating in the balls because the stereotypes they were channeling were white cishet men or white cishet women, which were ideals they aspired to be, but would never be because of their ethnicity or biology. This realness is in other words passing as the category, knowing the impossibility of achievement, yet the ballroom was a safe space to explore the question, “what if?” and fit into a category, although it was, in the end, an illusion. In class itself, we shared our movement phrase with another person. Then we added their phrase to ours. This redirected me to Burrow’s writing on material, where he writes that “placing things in relation to each other utterly changes them” (6). This in turn reminded me of the Kuleshov effect in film. It is an editing effect where Kuleshov used a man’s expressionless face and then added another shot and then edited back to the man’s expressionless face. Depending on the second shot Kuleshov edited to, the audience felt that the expression seemed hungry, if the second shot was soup, or depressed if the second shot was a coffin, although it was exactly the same shot in both. When putting this into the context of dance, as soon as we add b to a to create a+b, something changes in the way we see the movement and the connections, which I think is fascinating. Because this interested me I researched Judson church and found out that Lucinda Childs was one of the core members, which was amazing to me because she was at NYUAD with her dancers performing DANCE. When I went to her talk, it was amazing to hear her talk about the visual aspect of DANCE, specifically the choice to not refilm the dance that is projected on-screen but rather have the original dancers and the new generation dance side by side. When I participated in the dance instruction class, I thought it was intriguing how the dancers repeated the jumps and moves the other way round with different variation put on them. To me, it created a trance-like state that I think this type of repetition can evoke if it reaches its full potential.

Finally, in our discussion in class, we talked about gender, specifically Judith Butler’s idea of how gender established itself if a certain characteristic is performatively repeated, which I found intriguing as a concept, since mostly sex is thought of as biology and gender as psychology. I had never heard it phrased in such a concise way that made its meaning clear. The aspect of gender in postmodern dance is also interesting in my opinion. Today, I watched the movie Tanz Träume, or Dance Dreams in English, where two former students of Pina Bausch selected 40 teenagers to perform Kontakthof. One of the students said that the special thing about Pina Bausch’s type of dance is that it sometimes more feminine and sometimes more masculine, but that it is not male or female per se. Although a clear gender binary was presented in the performance in the movie, I do feel that it commented on gender, not by vanquishing it, but by putting it in the foreground. I also connected it to the Judson Church developments, since none of the teenagers had ever danced before, evoking the idea of the ‘neutral’ body in my mind. Through letting teenagers perform Kontakthof, meaning was added and lost, and the same occurred in Beyoncé’s music video for Countdown, where she or her choreographer clearly got more than inspired by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker dances. The original meaning of the choreography was adapted to fit the period of the music video and of the meaning of the song. The question is when does sampling turn into stealing. The perfect example for this is the Countdown video, since the choreography was taken from an obscure source which is not well known of nowadays, yet this constantly occurs in music as well, whether or not the person whose music is being sampled knows of it or not. To me, the perfect example is the use of Earth Moments in the album Voice of India, a very obscure source, sampled and used in La La La by Naughty Boy featuring Sam Smith, which was even included in the US Billboard Hot 100. In some ways it is great to see material being reused and given a second life, but only when it is credited which is unfortunately not the case in the majority of cases.