Looking Beyond Facile Understandings of "Literalness" in Music-Dance Collaborations Mark Morri's All Fours
Robb, Hamish J. ( 1937- )
Looking Beyond Facile Understandings of "Literalness" in Music-Dance Collaborations Mark Morri's All Fours / Hamish J. Robb .-- Edinburgh: : Edinburgh University Press, , 2012
21 p.
Dance Research -- Vol. 30, núm. 2, Winter 2012, p. 126 - 146
RESUMEN: Notions of "visualisation" or "literalness" in discussions of dance-music colaborations mistakenly imply that dance is able to map completely onto music, and such dacing says nothing new. Given the complexities involved in meaning formation through gesture, there is an endless number of ways to sympathetically choreograph the same musical phrase, just as there are numerous ways to interpret a single physical gesture. Through an analysis of Mark Morris´s All Fours, a choreography set to Bartok´s Fourth String Quartet, I offer an opposing view to those detractors of Morris who claim that his work is "overly literal". I argue that Morris´s sensitive choreography provides us with the missing link between the characters and amotions projected through Bartok´s music on the one hand, and the very precise and less audible compositional techniques on the other. Furthermore, I demonstrate how Morris´s carefully planned choreographic choices, repetitive mappings, and gestual tropes (the juxtaposition of two seemingly contradictory gestures) provide the means for highly imaginative and complex narratives, one of which I offer here. Thus , I ilustrate how dance gestures that may initially seem to simply "mimic" the music actually perform larger roles in the formation of networks of meaning.
Looking Beyond Facile Understandings of "Literalness" in Music-Dance Collaborations Mark Morri's All Fours / Hamish J. Robb .-- Edinburgh: : Edinburgh University Press, , 2012
21 p.
Dance Research -- Vol. 30, núm. 2, Winter 2012, p. 126 - 146
RESUMEN: Notions of "visualisation" or "literalness" in discussions of dance-music colaborations mistakenly imply that dance is able to map completely onto music, and such dacing says nothing new. Given the complexities involved in meaning formation through gesture, there is an endless number of ways to sympathetically choreograph the same musical phrase, just as there are numerous ways to interpret a single physical gesture. Through an analysis of Mark Morris´s All Fours, a choreography set to Bartok´s Fourth String Quartet, I offer an opposing view to those detractors of Morris who claim that his work is "overly literal". I argue that Morris´s sensitive choreography provides us with the missing link between the characters and amotions projected through Bartok´s music on the one hand, and the very precise and less audible compositional techniques on the other. Furthermore, I demonstrate how Morris´s carefully planned choreographic choices, repetitive mappings, and gestual tropes (the juxtaposition of two seemingly contradictory gestures) provide the means for highly imaginative and complex narratives, one of which I offer here. Thus , I ilustrate how dance gestures that may initially seem to simply "mimic" the music actually perform larger roles in the formation of networks of meaning.