DANCEMAKING IN UNEXPECTED PLACES: MOLDOVAN MUSIC AND VERTICAL DANCE IN WYOMING
Since 1998, vertical dance at the University of Wyoming has been an active catalyst for interactions among choreographers and dancers, composers and musical performers, audiences, rock climbers, and others. Outdoor performances at an impressive geologic formation have consistently drawn large audien...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
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Notograf Prim
2016-06-01
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| Series: | Studiul Artelor şi Culturologie: Istorie, Teorie, Practică |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://revista.amtap.md/wp-content/files_mf/1508853460Garnett_Dancemakinginunexpected.pdf |
| Summary: | Since 1998, vertical dance at the University of Wyoming has been an active catalyst for interactions among choreographers and dancers, composers and musical performers, audiences, rock climbers, and others. Outdoor performances at an impressive geologic formation have consistently drawn large audiences, and allowed choreographer and performer Margaret Wilson to consider the ways that vertical dancers come to embody widely varying environments through heightened sensitivity, improvisation, and other processes of “tuning in” (Hunter 2015: 181) to the world around them.
In 2013, as I stood on a high ledge on the massive Vedauwoo rock formation in Wyoming, I found that the sound of Moldovan nai naturally became a part of our outdoor environment as it echoed off of the rocks and projected out into the forest. Our pianist had begun to embody an effective sense of how to collaborate with dancers and their movement having accompanied their classes for many years. Nai easily became an integral part of her musical compositions.
Musicians who are more closely focused on devices such as instruments, sheet music, and microphones have been less able to improvise and interact spontaneously with the sensory world of vertical dance. Listening closely to create their best sound makes them less sensitive to distant aural, visual, and sensory phenomena that would allow them to embody their environment along with other performers and their audiences. In seeking to better adapt to
variable vertical dance settings, I found that Moldovan nai is especially well-suited for collaborating with other instruments and dancers in vertical dance environments. Moldovan melodies and rhythms have also become an important element of both outdoor and indoor vertical dance performances in Wyoming.
The broader movement, of playing panflute is more like dancing than the smaller movements required for playing transverse flutes. In addition, the social essence of learning and performing by ear, improvising, and telling stories, intrinsic in Moldovan folklore music encourages performers to interact with choreographers, dancers, other musicians, and their settings. “Lifeworlds” of ideas and emotions come into being around them throughout their many hours of working together, and vertical dance performances take on an intersubjective and relational character as environments are being formed and constantly changed through the actions and interactions of individual participants. Moldovan folklore music and the nai have become an integral part of that environment. |
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| ISSN: | 2345-1408 2345-1831 |