www.intermissionmagazine.ca: Yes, yes I do study theatre. Perhaps people can see it because in my (short) career as a dancer and choreographer, I have been enamoured with an embodied “hyper-theatricality.” Can you see it now? Overly-exaggerated facial expressions and extreme physical embodiment emanating from an unrestrained emotionality: these elements have come to define my dance work. I can’t discredit the queer-coding behind these sorts of statements; to be fair, my grown-out highlights and over-articulated hand gestures probably don’t help. Regardless: yes, I am a theatre scholar. Stick around me for longer than a first impression though, and you’ll come to realise that I’m a theatre scholar in name only.
2 comments:
I used to dance when I was younger, and I did it for around eight or ten years before I had to quit due to personal issues. Recently though, I have been interested in getting re-involved with dance again. I still very much admire the discipline it takes to keep going, especially since their careers are so short-lived too. Theater is rough when it comes to acknowledging its problems, but it's easy to forget that it could actually be worse in comparison to dance – which is a world theater often interacts with. The article didn’t mention this, but it will forever be in my mind how only up until the last five years or so, ballet shoes for dark-skinned dancers did not really exist. That they would – and still do – have to buy random pink or “skin” toned shoes to then cake them with their own foundations and THEN still do everything they need to do to break them in. This adds so many more hours that other dancers don’t have to do, and to what I have heard still not much has changed.
I really do wish that I engaged in dance more. Because I think it’s an art form that is so unique and similar to theater but also so different in so many ways. For example I know that in our school productions it is usually directed so that the set the sign is a little sparse so that it gives enough space for the authors to dance around and move and there’s so many considerations that go into designing something for dance rather than for theater and I found this article particularly interesting because they talk about this intersection between the theater and dance, which is not something that I particularly considered because I thought they were so similar but it’s weird that upon reading those I found how different they are. Although I wouldn’t particularly say agree with the statement that theatrical acting is all over-exaggerated facial expressions and extreme physical embodiments, I think there are a lot of facets to theatrical I think but I definitely understand where they’re coming from where downs can be a lot quieter and often times it’s not really thought to have these like overly dramatic and static movements while you see that more theater although I will say it like it doesn’t happen all the time in theater.
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