Analysing a piece of choreography

(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 the other girls, and they dance around the man and woman in red who are completely still to show no matter what happens his attention is on her, to prove , "He loves her" and not them. However, the majority of the time there is more men involved which I think portrays the power they have over women.

I think the music has a few undertones and beats that are quite intense but also layers of string instruments that gives the dance a feeling of elasticity, and the movements the dancers do really does compliment that sensation and accentuate the music's gorgeous fluidity. I think this does link back to the theme as the movements and music overall create a warming atmosphere and really make you feel you are watching two people genuinely in love. I think the audience would be in awe watching this and just consistently intrigued in what's going on as it would make them feel at ease to watch and happy as they get to see love shared around on stage.

I think they used a creative process where they thought of words and tried to make the shape or lines using their bodies as they make a lot of shapes repeatedly as if they are trying to get a point across.

There is a few powerful movements in this piece which I think linked back to the fight scene in our piece where we did big powerful jumps and even punches to show we were being aggressive towards each other even though we all represented one person, so we were just an enemy to ourselves. In this piece there are also a few differences to ours for example we don't move in a way that shows loving feelings towards each other we are aggressive, and technically all one person instead of many different individuals.

Bibliography

Martha Graham Dance Company, 2013. Diversions Of Angels- Dance. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv9r8-bq_FQ> [Accessed 1 December 2020].