Word: dancers
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...most exuberant girl around, Kitri, makes a bravura triumph for Gelsey Kirkland. One tends to think of her playing an unearthly maiden in a romantic ballet. But despite her fragile body, she is a gutsy, bold dancer with almost palpable physical courage. She flings herself into the role of Kitri. Her foot hits the back of her head when she jumps (and she leaps the night away). Her attacks are almost stabbing. Her fan flips constantly - unless she is using it to poke Basil. She so clearly relishes keeping him in line that one wonders if there...
After choosing the style, the actual composition begins. The central elements are the motion and expression of the whole body of the dancer, the interactions of the dancers to each other, and the spatial orientation the dancers have on the stage...
...been of all Cunningham's choreography: the basic processes of the human body's motion, discerned with a painstaking and endlessly refreshing eye. Like a painter absorbed in something as slight as the fall of light on a glass jar, Cunningham is fascinated by the eloquent detail: a dancer's leg arcing upward like a searchlight against the sky, the drift of weight in space when the body leans slowly backwards, dancers bounding across the stage like stones skipped across water. The patterns aren't only visual, either: in one dance, "Torse," where there was very little sound accompaniment, Cunningham...
...very basic component of movement, something so radically simple that ordinarily one wouldn't think about it at all. The subject of "Torse," for instance, is change of weight: the disturbance of symmetry when weight shifts from one foot to another, the still points of fragile equilibrium when a dancer balances on one leg, the other crooked in the air behind her. Like a drop of oil spreading through cloth, the point of focus begins to color one's perception of all kinds of movement: a jump becomes weight gathered down and exploded upward; one dancer lifting another becomes weight...
...Sounddance" expands the formula to include the weight of bodies in relation to each other, exploring the way movement modifies when it encounters other movement. Here, the knotting and swirling, folding and unfolding of two or more dancers works a flowing balance between frantic spinning and the entropy of falling weight. The individual dancer is buffeted helplessly, like a banner flapping in the wind; but the linkage patterns of clasped hands and wrapped legs modulate into a series of intricate resolutions...