Evaluation of Performance- The Missing Plane

On Monday the 14^th of April we performed our “Missing Plane” dance. In my group were Chantee, Tiffany and Scarlet. This dance was created from our interpretations of Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations”. Revelations is about slavery and fighting for freedom, which shows it is based on human behaviour. We chose a current event which was the disappearance of the plane, to base our dance on so it would be appropriate to modern audiences. If we were to put our dance on stage we would have updated costumes, lighting, and props, to the ones that were used in Ailey’s “Revelations”. Our dances style was Horton technique, and jazz so Modern audiences would be interested as it is current, but also inspired by Alvin Ailey.

Our group’s dance is relevant to today’s audiences because we have based it on a current, political event, and we have current music, which is relevant to our theme. It is relevant to audiences as they are currently going through emotional trauma and pain because they don’t know where their families are, and it’s a worry for the other people in the country and the world to just to lose a plane. We showed that plane in our dance as we used formations to look like the plane. We are standing in a straight line to show the plane with our arms as the wings.

We also tried to show the heartache of family and we did this by splitting up into pairs and doing duets to show the different relationships, me and Scarlet were a mother and daughter, we showed this by using contact work and our ending position showed we were close, as I was next to her when she died with my head down to show emotion.

We have interpreted “Revelations” by giving our dance a theme and a meaning, as the dances in Revelations have a lot of emotion behind and you can see that every move they do has a purpose to the theme. Alvin Ailey uses a lot of chorographic devices and we tried to use as many choreographic devices as possible like fragmentation; we used this by chopping Kelly’s choreography she gave us up and changing the sections. Also, when we did duets we each took a different part of previous choreography and repeated it. When we went into section 3 we changed the direction and all through the dance we changed the speed, as it started of slow and got faster. Ailey also chose his own music, which was gospel, and we chose our music because it had accents where we could either change the speed or a new section could start.  Ailey changed his formations a lot throughout the performance, and we changed our formations and started with a duet. I came on by myself and did a solo and then pulled Chantee on. The formations we had were diamonds, diagonal lines and squares which worked because it wasn’t all the same.

‘Revelations’ could be updated to today’s audiences as they could change the theme as there is no longer segregation on that same scale. They could also improve the costumes, lighting and props. If they added more duets, trios and solos, or more dancers in general they would have a developed dance. The Music could be more current and they could change the styles of dance.