Soda Lake Flashcards
Soda Lake ->
-Choreography = Richard Alston
-Dancer = Mark Baldwin
-Designer = Nigel Hall
-Composer = Nigel Osbourne - silence - didn’t want the music to detract from the dance
What is Soda Lake based on?
-Based on a dry lake in Nevada whereby a sculpterer visited in 1967 and made drawings of various landscapes including soda lake
-It was originally created for a BBC TV program, but when this didn’t happen, Alston made it as a performance for the dancer Michael Clark
-The exploration of space in the landscape of the Mojave dessert
What is the physical setting?
-Simple and abstract, eponymous structure - its a tall black pole suspended from the ceiling and another pole on a diagonal alignment with an oval shape ring at the top
How many dancers are there?
-1 - soloist
What is the structure of the dance?
1-The awakening
2-Tracing the shapes
3-Major section
4-Epilogue
What is the movement example based on the sentinel position?
-This position is repeated several times
-The dancer supports himself in a prone position on one hand and flexed knees, creating a diaganol line across the body
-The gesture arm is raised in front and the dancer looks off the hand into the horizon
-Represents the diaganol line in the sculpture and an animal looking off into the distance surveying its prey
What is a key movement example in section 2, tracing the shapes?
-The dancer stands underneath the ellipsis in an arabesque aterre and he extends the arms up high in front of him tracing the shapes in a circular motion above his head before doing a Grahamesque spiral to the floor and lies on the ground in a supine position and skims the back of his hand underneath the vertical pole
-This shows the exploration of space and the sculpture - source of vocabulary for the dance
What is the spatial design and the relationship of the dancer to the sculpturer movement example?
-The dancer stands facing the pole in a parallel fourth position with one arm in a horizontal curve around the vertical pole
-As he performs a slow full plie he maintains the relationship of the arm to the pole clearly highlighting the dense rigidity of the metal and the vertical pull of the sculpture in space
When was the dance originally created and when was it performed by Rambert?
-It was originally created in 1981 for Michael Clarke, ex-Royal Ballet performer
-It was performed in Rambert in 1986 by Mark Baldwin - future Artistic Director of Rambert
