Diversion Of Angels Performed By Martha Graham

Holding it gently across her torso, the scarf is seen as symbolic of her life and her values, and her use of slow and sustained dynamics signifies the value of the shawl. As she places the white cloth gently downstage centre, she flings each side of the scarf in contrasting directions and swipes her hands across the shawl gently on a sagittal plane across her body, repeating the movement on either sides. The swiping actions across her body are manipulated through the dance as the movement is executed quicker and with magnified body generated movement. The arm movements also are modified in course as she extends her arms over her and on a frontal plane. The arm movements’ contexts are often viewed as imploring for help and breaking loose from the suffering of slavery. The motif of the scarf is consistent as she expresses her exasperation behind the shawl, performing centre stage across its length. This implies she is restricted by her individual body as she lives a lifetime of slavery due to her racial

After giving a brief introduction to her subject, Desmond quickly begins her analysis on the piece Radha choreographed by Ruth St. Denis. She states that St. Denis was one of the mothers of modern dance in America despite how her works are not as well remembered as others including Martha Graham’s. She depicts Radha by describing the dancing quality, patterns in choreography, lighting, set, and costume in detail. Desmond also recounts the social issues that are reflected in the piece including gender roles and race. The author’s main point in writing “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s Radha of 1906” was to introduce St. Denis and share her detailed analysis of St. Denis’ Radha.

Red and blue are two colors that carry a lot of symbolic meaning. For example, red is a color associated with passion, love, fire, danger, anger, and adventure. Whereas blue is associated with water, depth, stability, trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven. Her decision of separating the two colors by dividing her body into two parts perhaps reveals that there are two sides to Charline, each half contradicts the other. One side of her is warm compassionate and loving, whilst the other is cold, eager and determined. However, the middle ground is when both colors are intertwined, creating a beautiful purple balance. This is the point of intersection, where both her personalities merge into one, creating

The melody sounds somber and serious and the energy of the dancers suddenly changes. A spoken word takes place and all of the dancer begin to tell their stories of pain and struggle through movements. The spoken word talks about the journey of men and women who overcame social injustice. In the dancer's movements you could clearly see how they correlated together. Movements were powerful and restraint at the same time giving the audience the idea of the women were pushing through something that was bearing them down. There was a lot of expansion in the chest, back, and arms followed by contractions in the body. As soon as the spoken word was finished the mood of the piece change again and the pianist began to play a upbeat tune that brought the dancers back in to a more positive and high spirit. A lot of polyrhythms take place as the dancers jump high and move their arms back and forth moving throughout the space. This happens in unison at first and then solos, trios, and duets happen in this section of the dance. The expression on their faces add charismatic charm to this piece. Their expressions continue to move them into different emotions and feelings that are relatable to everyday

"American Masters: Martha Graham, About the Dancer." PBS. PBS, 16 Sept. 2005. Web. 17 Nov. 2012. .

In the second section it represents the women fighting for their freedom. The movements are a lot more circular in this section. It uses more contractions, releasing & vibratory movements. In the first two sections, the dancer shows the struggle being not only physical but emotional also. She does this by the powerful expressions she uses on her face. She even imitates a couple of screams that play in the song ‘Been On A Train’. This gives the audience a clear understanding of the how she is feeling.

Who: One choreographer that draw my attention is Martha Graham. Particularly, when I watched her dance ‘HERETIC’, I was emotional.

Tita enters a state of despair when she discovers her true love, Pedro, will be marrying her sister Rosaura. During the preparation of their wedding, Tita begins to feel ill due to the strong sense of heartache filling the course of her veins. As she looks at Rosaura’s luxurious fabric, Tita stares “at the whiteness of the sheet, only for a few seconds, but long enough to cause a sort of blindness” (33). The white bed sheet represents the hopeless and wretched state of Tita’s romance. She is grief-stricken; Tita can no longer withstand the anguish caused by her sister’s marriage depicted by the white of the bed sheet. In addition, this symbol causes a jarring sensation of defeat. Tita is inundated with “blindness” because the thought of not being able to be with Pedro is beyond bearable. Esquivel is able to demonstrate all of these scattering emotions through one simple color. Tita continues in this anxious state as “The whiteness of the granulated sugar frightened her. She felt powerless against it, feeling at that any moment the white color might seize her mind…”(34). Tita’s fear of losing her true love is now displayed through all items containing a white pigment. White symbolizes the virginity Tita will unfortunately never escape. Ergo, the color terrorizes the protagonist in preparation for the wedding—a wedding she is forbidden to

Puritans and reformers of seventeenth century England have been given a bad name for their part in history. This is primarily because they were working against the grain and trying to create change in world that saw change as a threat. The time period was turbulent and there was bound to be resistance in a world that was dominated by Catholics and those that had reformed to abide by their King’s law. The puritans of the time were considered extreme and rubbed people the wrong way because they wanted a world that abided by their morals and ethical codes. For this, they took the blame for the misery that many suffered during this age, but as we see in Fire from Heaven, this is not a fair assessment. The Puritans of this time wanted to improve the lives of the people and society as a whole through morality and purity.

always been known for the risky and powerful movements which are often why dancers retire from the company. The dancer’s movements were often very intense and emotive, such as the “throws” across the stage in which the dancers would, almost violently, launch themselves across the stage in different forms (leaps, falls and flips to name a few). Another section where the movements were emotive is where the dancers were thrusting their hips in different positions to perhaps show sexuality in “self”.

Watching the video “A Dancer’s World” made me want to become a professional dancer. Martha Graham’s dancers showed how delicate, defined, sharp, smooth, and astatic a choreography can be. It illustrated how much hard word and dedication it’s needed, but the results will always be beautiful. Also Martha Graham explained how dancing with a partner can be. She also talked about males as dancers, but in her video she demonstrates how men danced with females using physical contact. The techniques and how the piece turns out to be. Both genders jumped a lot through out each piece of performed and that’s something loved. During a piece, there can be both gender dancing separately doing their own thing. The techniques are used differently by males

The piece was trying to convey the idea of freedom. Liberating the soul by expressing what it feels in a form of dance, which is something that can be seen. The movements were free, the performers moved around the stage depicting natural dance movements.

<br>Stella undresses into a "light blue, satin" kimono while Blanche undresses into a "pink silk" brassiere and "white" skirt. The colours used on the clothes are soft pastel colours, which are generally colours worn by women. These light colours are a contrast to the bright, bold colours that were used to describe the clothes on the men. The colours on the men's clothes infer masculinity and aggressiveness while the clothes on Stella and Blanche are feminine, passive/neutral and calm colours, reflecting their personality. The white skirt that Blanche wears denotes purity and fragility, which contradicts her character but can be seen as another contrast with the sinuous and strong characters of the men. These are the complete opposite of the colours in the introduction. The fabrics that are used such as "satin" and "silk" are soft fabrics we associate to femininity and women too.

The dance that I will be focusing on is entitled: thinking sensing standing feeling object of attention. The dance, to me, symbolizes the socialization of persons in Western civilization concerning gender roles. In the beginning there are gestures that are separated from emotion and full-embodiment, but as the dance progresses the gestures become more meaningful and recognizable. The lighting starts out very specific and narrow, then the light encompasses the entire stage, and eventually the dancers are silhouetted as they return to a familiar movement motif in the end. The music is mainly instrumental with occasional soft female vocals, and the lyrics suggest emotion, which is interesting because the dancers do not convey emotion until

Martha Graham’s production of Night Journey is a unique and symbolic contemporary dance work. Graham bases many of her dance pieces on Greek myths and this is seen in her work Night Journey. Graham has manipulated elements of contemporary dance to communicate the emotion of the main character, Jocasta. Graham’s previous work focuses on depicting both the power and struggle of female idols in history. Graham has choreographed Night Journey to explore the perspective of Queen Jocasta, the main protagonist in the piece rather than the story of Oedipus. (Mueller, 2007) Graham has skilfully choreographed significant symbols and motifs to convey Jocasta’s emotions of grief, pain confusion and love through the manipulation of motifs and