#choreograpy

Mercury Enters Virgo!

Mercury Enters Virgo A sound mind is a sound body. Juvenal As Mercury enters its home sign of Virgo, you’ll have an excellent opportunity to get mental clarity on a specific area of your life.  Mercury is the fastest moving planet and is also closest to the Sun, so you can expect to see results sooner than later.  If you’d like to learn a new skill or have an important test or examination,…

Malavika Sarukkai debuts on group choreography Vamatara – Light

Malavika Sarukkai, danseuse par excellence, an acknowledged choreographer and a Padma Shree Awardee is introducing a group choreography for the first time ever, titled amatara – To The Light on September 2, 2016 at the Chowdiah Memorial Hall, Malleshwaram, Bangalore.

Malavika’s choreographs are known for the incandescent beauty of the classical language of Bharata Natyam and the energised…

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWZGAExj-es)

Composition I: Choreographic Critical Review of a Work

9 December 2015

Choreographic Review: Sia’s “Elastic Heart” choreographed by Ryan Heffington

Although it is a beautiful and strong work alone, Sia’s official music video for  “Elastic Heart” further enhances the song with Ryan Heffington’s choreography. The same dynamic team of Heffington and director Daniel Askill that brought you the “Chandelier” video with Sia and 12-year-old dancer Maddie Ziegler now strikes again, and with actor Shia Labeouf in this powerful artistic collaboration.

A giant metal cage inside a white warehouse. A scruffy young man in nude underwear and a scrawny girl in the bleach-blonde iconic Sia wig and a nude leotard. Simple production set. They are dirty, trapped, alone, and their relationship is playful, caring, aggressive, controlling, intimate, distressed, and more. Unanimously the video pulls emotions out of its viewers, regardless of the variety of interpretations. The giant cage in an empty warehouse hardly reduces the amount of space accessible, but the idea of a cage morphs the space and its meaning: limited, controlled, confined, and trapped. Being caged is bad. You don’t want to be in a cage. The space inside the cage is undesirable and negative. In comparison, outside of the cage is the positive yearned escape to freedom.

Inside the cage the two prisoners have a circular area to move about, and the camera shows perspectives from both sides of the cage and also from various heights, angles, and zoom-factors, giving the performance a full 360-degree view and then some that comes with filmed dance. Ziegler and Labeouf can be on opposite sides of the cage but when viewed from outside of the cage, they are still both in the cage, and therefore “together”. We are very aware of the distance between them through relation to the cage. Labeouf climbs the bars of the cage up to the top and hangs with more than 6 feet below him. Especially because of its inaccessibility, people hardly ever notice the space above eye-level or more than 7 feet above the ground, and much of the time there isn’t anything in that space other than beams and ventilation. In “Elastic Heart” Labeouf travels to and occupies space in the air, enabled by the bars that cage him. The viewers’ perception of space is expanded with a new awareness of that upper upper level of space, yet also reminded of the confinement that the dancers are caged within. We may have forgotten this powerful set/prop when the camera films from inside the cage alongside Shia and Maddie, but when the camera is out of the cage we again see the shapes of the room, cage, and the different negative space created when a body can be so much higher than the other.

Getting back in shape is interesting. First it was a discovery of what’s still available for me to access. Then it is remembering how to access it. And now it’s realizing how much room there is to improve.

This feeling has me both excited, frustrated and craving technique. I want room and space to dive into the details and train my body to move.

And so I will focus on consistently attending the classes that are the most challenging (Nina McNeely @thesweatspotla) and adding in some more classes that will allow me to dive into technique, open up my body, help me find my flexibility and access my strength. 

All of this, so I can simply let my heart beat freely while performing each of the details in the choreography to its fullest.