The centre that became renowned for the creation of New Dance was Dartington college of Arts, who provided a new sort of school, and encouraged experimental expression from new dancers/choreographers. The key objective of the college was to produce experimental work and push conventional dance boundaries. Much of the topics the dance focussed upon included social politics.
Ideas from Judson Dance Theatre’s initial work were discarded during this period and new dance in Britain became increasingly motivated by social and political subject matters.
The dance was mainly performed within traditional dance spaces and the movement developed a more traditional form of movement, with the re-introduction of traditional ballet expressions and motifs and work introducing classical forms of dance like folk dance from associated countries.
Yolande Snaith’s “Swinger” based on the poem “A Lover’s Discourse” by Roland Barthes, represents the main semantic of the story, the love poem and its syntactical content with classical movement styles. For example connoting a dreamy state of love/desire, the connotations provided by the ballet style have been adopted. The use of arm extensions, small skipping steps and spins, create a feeling of romantic illusion, used to further demonstrate the feelings expressed by the actor/writer figure.
The use of contact improvisation techniques developed by Judson Dance Theatre inthe1960’s are also clear, the use of lifts, rolls, support, counter-balance to convey the struggles of love and obstacles which need to be overcome. The use of pedestrian and gestural movement is used by Snaith to communicate mundane tasks, rituals of relationship.
The use of an actor/narrator figure within the dance is an important factor developed from post-modern dance that has been re-introduced by Yolande Snaith. Her writer character walks around as a non-dancer, briefly interacting with the dancer’s to manipulate the action of the swinging pendulum.
The collage structure of the dance, which is especially evident in the videoed version of the dance, is another feature of the post-modern dance movement re-introduced by Snaith.
The movement is technically challenging, interesting and uses varied styles of movement, including pedestrian, gestural and contact work. There is use of women lifting women, women lifting men and visa versa so traditional gender roles associated to romantic stories have not constricted her ability to communicate through the broadest vocabulary of movement.
Snaith uses the styles of post-modern experimentation to add another layer of interpretation to her dance.
The piece diffuses the distinctions between styles developed within the early contemporary dance movement with what was developed at Dartington during the seventies.
The second piece we have studied “The Snowball Effect” performed by V-TOL and devised by Mark Murphy V-TOL’s artistic director uses even more technically and visually challenging movement than Snaith’s romantic interpretation of the poem “A Lover’s Discourse”
The movement in “The Snowball Effect” a piece devised for the BBC2 Dance for Camera series appears to be focusing on the obstacles put in the way of life. The dance follows a distinctly linear pathway, with dancer’s movement over and between various every-day obstacles.
Mark Murphy is known to comment very little about his ideas and inspiration, preferring to let the audience interpret the movement. Through his work on “32 feet per second per second” became interested in mixing live dance with film, either live or pre-recorded to create a new level of communication with his audience.
“The Snowball Effect” has been manipulated to this effect; the movement has been slowed and speeded up with elaborate use of camera angle to create various perspectives.
This use of different mediums within his work advocates the ideals of contemporary dance styles. The movement, often criticised to be taking a back seat to Murphy’s technological experimentation, appears to be technically complex with movement taking place over and between various obstacles. The obstacles are overcome by the dancer through a variety of rolls, jumps and athletic styles of movement.
This athletic content may stem from Murphy’s previous passion for sport or his commitment to the teachings of new dance from the Laban Centre which he attended in 1989.
The piece clearly focuses of technical movement, developed through contact improvisation, exaggeration of pedestrian movement over obstacles and most importantly of course the use of technology in expressing the dance movement.
The use of old styles in new work does not detract from the validity of the creative process adopted by the choreographers. The styles are all individual, and explorative. The re-introduction of old methods shows the willingness of new choreographers to develop styles without constriction to one style or another, indeed one of the initial desires for contemporary dance, which aimed to break traditional moulds, was to broaden definition of dance.
Therefore by using the entire range of movement techniques available must be in the end a positive regression rather than a step back in ideology.
