Dancing in the Landscape

The weekend of parents weekend, I had the opportunity of participating in and attending the Elon Dance Company’s annual site specific dance concert, Dancing in the Landscape. This concert was held on a beautiful, sunny Sunday afternoon behind the Performing Arts Center and it was overall a really unique experience. It was unique in the sense that I have grown up dancing in studios or on stages where the audience is usually seated in front of you and the dancers are the sole focus. In this situation however, the audience is standing wherever the dancers are not. In other words, for this performance the audience could be either standing in the center of the grass watching the dancers move around them, or they could be standing on the patio watching the dancers in a more traditional manner.

Another interesting aspect of this performance is the fact that the dancers themselves are competing with nature for attention. In a traditional setting, as I mentioned before, the dancing is really the only thing to focus on. For this site specific performance, anything in the surrounding environment, small or big, like a duck in the pond or people just passing by, is another distraction that can easily draw the audience’s attention away from the dancing. Therefore, with this type of performance it is especially important to keep the audience very captivated and intrigued and I feel that this performance accomplished that for the most part.

I took part in the first piece of the performance and it was captivating in my opinion, because it was so different than the typical dance performance. It was a piece based on improvisation so only a framework of the dance was laid out ahead of time and most of the content was thought of by the dancers right on the spot. It also focused largely on highlighting the environment so the movement performed drew the audience’s focus to a different aspect of the environment each time. For example, at one point the dancers were performing in the planted shrubbery next to the Performing Arts building, and at another point they were performing on a bench in front of the lake so the audience was able to get a new perspective of the space while watching the dancers. By the end of the piece, after following the dancers around, the audience had made a full 360 degree rotation.

The third piece of the performance was more along the lines of traditional dance, yet it still had its quirks. This piece was composed of African dance inspired movements but the soundtrack was techno and thus created a very interesting atmosphere. The space was used very effectively as the dancers formed all sorts of geometric patterns and shapes and it was overall a very appealing dance.

The only aspect of this performance that bothered me was that the concepts behind the dances were more abstract than usual, and this in combination with the distracting environment I felt made it easier for the audience’s attention to be drawn away from the dancing. I felt that there were many times throughout the concert that I saw various audience members’ eyes wandering about or people murmuring to each other most likely because they were confused as to what was going on. Even as a participant I felt that the concepts needed to be introduced and explained more so that the audience could be more engaged and invested in the performance. Aside from this however, I feel this event was executed very well and was a perfect event for parents weekend.