last night at the ADF i saw Ron Brown's company, EVIDENCE.
brown's choreography is so complex, so constantly full of motion that i couldn't stop wondering how those dancers remember all the steps. for each piece there must've been 10,000 moves to commit to memory. there's no way my brain can't hold all that information... some days i can barely remember how to put one foot in front of the other.
when i worked at ADF years ago, there was a woman on faculty who studied "memory for movement." what a fascinating concept... how dancers learn and remember sequences of movement.
i guess the closest correlation to my own life were my years in marching band. we'd learn little sections of the number, do it over and over again, then piece that portion together with a section we learned the day before. sheer repetition. but there's got to be a better system for professional dancers...
so my mind drifts from the performance as i think about all of this, then snaps back to watching this sea of endlessly energetic bodies. but then as i start watching again i begin to think about how someone who joins this company 10 years from now is going to learn this complex series of movements.
i've heard about dance notation, but i just can't wrap my brain around how it works. you can't write it down on manuscript paper like a musical composition... that's the only kind of notation i understand.
it's apparent that my mind drifted a lot during ron brown's performance last night, but i still loved the show. there was just so much to think about. (and i haven't even begun to address the message of the pieces... liberation, oppression, grace, salvation.
good stuff.
oh, we went to international delights for dinner. they have fresh watermelon juice. it's phenomenal.
Posted by xta at June 26, 2004 02:31 PM | TrackBack