DANCE 340 Blog #1

[Courtney Tyler]

http://www.dance-tech.net/video/pan-contemporary-dance-for-film

The first video that I watched was “Pan- A Contemporary Dance for Film”.  The movement was more so humanistic gestures as opposed to classical dance elements.  These gestures gave the connotation of anger, stress, and anxiety.  The movement was very emotion based.  The choreography throughout the video was repetitious and often used unison.  Floor work, shaking, touching of the face, and tossing of the hair were key movement choices in the piece.  

The use of the camera was very effective in creating the atmosphere of this piece.  It zoomed very close on body parts that were important to be seen.  Some parts of the video were sped up and slowed down, as well as focused and unfocused.  There were very quick cuts to different locations and often flashed between two locations.  There were many changes in camera angle, for example, in one scene the camera was lower than the dancer, which created an interesting effect. 

Combined, the music, locations, costumes, movement, and camera effects/angles created a creepy, anxious atmosphere.  I felt that the video was well made and very interesting to watch.

 

http://www.dance-tech.net/video/the-follower-sarah-olivia

The second video I watched was titled “The Follower”.  The movement in this piece played with the location.  Repetition was used a lot in the dance, as well as a lot of kicks.  The camera angles of the piece panned across the room to follow the dancer, but also stayed still at times as well.  There were changes in level of the camera, which made it indicative that someone was following the first dancer.  The piece also used camera angles to call attention to something behind the dancer by taking the dancer out of the center of the shot and only filming the dancer from the waist down.  One interesting thing that I saw in this video was in the hallway, the dancers got farther and farther away from the camera while moving as the camera stayed still.  I felt that this was an interesting way to use the location.