Portia's Choreography Blog

(Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 2013) "Exchange"- Merce Cunningham I think in this piece Merce Cunningham is trying to portray, different people and in their own ways to show no one is the same and that we all do things differently like the dancers do in this clip. I think the movements are supposed to be strange and weird along with what they are wearing to further depict no one is "normal" and everyone is themselves, not someone else. I think in this section the choreographer has used the dancers very well, as there is a mixture of men and women, all moving around the stage in creative and innovative ways, this creates a busy and confusing effect a bit like the effect of life and this represents how there is always a lot of people around you doing things you aren't doing, and would never do. However even though they aren't doing the exact same thing at the same time, they are moving with a similar style and some repeated movements which I think also portr...

( Martha Graham Dance Company, 2013) "Diversions of Angels"- Martha Graham In this piece I think that Graham is trying to portray a message about the contrast of people and how they perceive certain things. There is a female dancer in red and the female dancer in white, so they look the same on the outside, however, I believe they wear the different colours to represent the different personalities and characters inside. All the men and women dancing wear beige tights and look really simple. There is a romantic connection between the red dancer and one of the men so i think perhaps the piece could be a fight between different girls and their personalities trying to win over someone's love and affection.   I think the choreographer has used the dancers very interestingly, the entire way through the main focus is the women, the men surround them, giving them attention. Occasionally a group of four women are seen on the stage which I think are used as almost competition to ...

Near the beginning of the piece in the second section, everyone moves around in their own pathways, and we all gravitated too far to the right, the consequence of this was no one was on the left hand side of the stage and it looked bare, so from an audience perspective it would have looked chaotic and unpleasant, it also made the space for us as dancers to move in, smaller and more compact meaning we had less space to move and more chance of collisions. To solve this, I changed my pathway from going straight to the right side to weaving back round and staying mostly towards the left. Jess also decided to stay on the left side for longer so that we have more space to move around.  In the 3rd section, nostalgic memory, there was a split focus on the stage that included everyone, there is a small group on 4 in the middle and then 6 of us dancing around them in the semicircle, however in this section there was too much going on and it made the movement look too busy and messy. So to co...