Morgan Smith
Professor Nunn
Dance 181; 12:30
6 December 2012
Unicorn
“ Mphhhh”. “Wphoo”. The first sounds that you hear when walking in to take your seat for the beginning performance. The dancers rotate breathing in to a microphone creating a unique rhythm while the other dancers are dancing or what looks like dancing. The untraditional form with the combination of proximal distance and touching of other dancers is almost uncomfortable to watch, but is appealing in the sense of improvisation. Your eyes bounce from the extension of a hand being placed on another dancer as to help the second dancer move to a new position in order for the first dancer to then move accordingly. Each touch, foot placement, and extension movement is exhilarating to watch. Each dancers response to the slightest touch and movement of the dancer farthest away is perceived as meditated as if that one dancer was going to execute that specific move before the other dancer had a chance to turn or leap. In relation to the recording of the exhales in the air taken at the beginning of the performance, the dancers subjective reaction, emotion, is translated through their dancing, leaving their faces vulnerable and ready to absorb the free floating feelings of disappointment, hope, relief, and fate. In this performance the dancers practice and exploit contradictions with their bodies, each other, the choreography, and their relationship to the audience. This dance emphasizes that the human body is magic in itself by pushing the human body to its limits in emotion, vulnerability, strength and flexibility. Unicorn is a dance assembled from a suspicion that we can’t make magic happen and belief that magic is inevitable every time. “The medium of dance is movement, the instrument is the human body, and the subject matter is the human body creating motion through time and space” (Royce Martin). This quote identifies greatly with the performance of Unicorn. Because throughout the performance, the dancers’ bodies were the instruments of relaying the message, that magic can’t be made to happen and that it is inevitable every time, to the audience. They did so by dancing in the three dimensions of dance; time, space, and force in the style of modern improvisational dance. The recorded breathing phases are the pulse and it determines the tempo and pace at which the dancers performed. For example, when the pulse was strong the dancers were weak, and when the pulse was weak the dancers were strong. Each dancer executed their own movements, which alternated between sizes, openness and closeness of the body, levels, leaping in the air to standing level to horizontal work on the floor, focus of sight, and floor pattern, recognition of other dancers’ positions. These characteristics made the audience become more intrigued with how each dancer was utilizing their space as an individual dancer and as a group.
The entity of the performance of Unicorn was contact improvisational, meaning that the dancers relied on each other to bear another dancer’s weight, shifts in balance, sharing physical space and opposite sex support, where the women lifted other women and men as well, and the men lifted other men and women, which identifies with the dimension of force within dance. One of the characteristics of force in dance is climax. The climax of Unicorn occurred when there was a brief intermission where the dancers asked to the audience to move to the other side of the auditorium, and a cello player started the second half of the performance. From the first half of the performance, there were rondos of form, choreographic structure, between the dancers before splitting into chance, which created unpredictability. Also, as the dancers transitioned with the cello player, the form of rounds, staggered entry of movement, became more prominent within the second half of the performance of Unicorn. Leslie Seiters, the choreographer of Unicorn, captured the
