How can dance be used to demonstrate power

They will build their background on the history of jazz and its use of improvisation to demonstrate jazz dance movements. Students will emotionally and physically tell a story through dance and pantomime. How can dance tell stories and preserve histories? Discover dance and its impact on culture by exploring Ancient Egyptian rituals and Native American legends.

Learn how dance tells stories and poems through a language of movement and music, and pick up a few moves yourself. How do fables and myths explain the unknown and preserve cultures? What makes a good story? How do plays comment on societal issues? Grab a pencil and prepare to create original poems, experience the Civil War through letters, and parse symbolism and metaphor in this exploration of language arts.

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They move—this is the action they perform. Movement can be divided into two general categories:. Action includes small movements like facial expressions or gestures, as well as larger movements like lifts, carries, or catches done with a partner or in a group. Dancers work together with a choreographer to practice and refine the action of the dance. The action of the dance includes slaps and claps, falls, prances, jumps in place as well as turns from side to side. Dance moves through space in an endless variety of ways.

The list above helps us understand how to think about movement through space. Imagine how many ways you could perform a simple movement, like clapping your hands if you ran it through the different concepts listed above.

Remember, space can be both indoors and outdoors, and some dances are created with specific spaces in mind. Notice how the concept of space is explored in a variety of ways as the dancers constantly change direction and orientation. Their relationship to one another also keeps shifting. At times they form two lines, passing through one another. At other moments, they move in unison. Watch for both straight and curved pathways and think about how many ways the choreographer was able to manipulate the element of space.

Choreographers have to make decisions about timing. Are their movements quick or slow? Are certain steps repeated in different speeds during the work? If so, why? We can think of time in the following ways:. The action of the hands slapping and feet stomping creates the complex rhythm that the audience hears.

So now we have bodies moving through space and time. Not quite. We need the fifth and last element of dance—energy. Energy helps us to identify how the dancers move.

What effort are they using? Perhaps their movements are sharp and strong, or maybe they are light and free. Energy also represents the quality of the movement—its power and richness. For choreographers and dancers, there are many possibilities. The effort the dancers use can communicate meaning, depending on the energy involved.

A touch between two dancers may be gentle and light, perhaps indicating concern or affection; or it may be sudden and forceful, indicating anger or playfulness. Energy is crucial in bringing the inner expression of emotion out to the stage performance. The element of energy is important in this performance of dance team Kaba Modern. The dancers use a sharp, percussive attack and have pauses between movements that break the flow. Kaba Modern, like other hip hop groups, has a sense of weight.

They bend their knees and frequently move to the floor. Cheyney, Gay. Princeton Book Company, Peripach Center for Arts Education, Invitation to Dance. New York: A. How can dance tell stories and preserve histories? As the dancers assume the position of lifeless corpses, recorded testimonials from Aleppans speak of their memories of the city while the dancers spin in whirling dervish skirts.

Yet the premise for Requiem for Aleppo provokes a crucial question: can dance meaningfully add to the language of politics and protest? Attempts to understand political events through dance have a long history. In the s, Southland by Katherine Dunham portrayed lynching to highlight the treatment of African Americans in the southern states of the US. Such was the shock of audiences that the piece was never actually performed in the US itself and Dunham suffered professionally for her audacity.

The method continues; the issues change. Created for a cast of 36 dancers, their collective movement aspired to a sense of sculptural unity while emphasising the dehumanising nature of mass migration. There were images of hundreds of men, women and children. Then and now they were desperate people. It is easy to have sensational viewpoints but if you know history, you see the patterns.