A "Modern" Weekend

Last weekend I joined the rest of my family- minus our newest member William, who had to work- in Utah for my youngest sister Sarah's senior dance recital. This is the first and last performance that I was able to see of her during her college career, since I have been in school the rest of the time. It was so great to see her perform so incredibly- what a talented dancer she is!

We were hard core fans and attended all three performances- that's over 6 hours of dance- and a post discussion with the company. Sarah is the president of the BYU dance ensemble- a modern dance group. Here is the photo of Sarah on their bulletin board in the RB!

I have personally never been good at modern dance, so I quite admire those who can do it because it is something that is quite organic, and you have to move your body in unique ways and make it still look good. For me, modern dance is like modern art. There are some pieces that I appreciate because they are challenging the boundaries of what is "art" and doing something unique. There are other pieces that I love and feel really represents a feeling/concept/idea in a new way. Other pieces I just don't get and other pieces that I just don't like. All of these were found at Sarah's dance concerts. Fortunately, I quite enjoyed and liked the pieces Sarah was in, but some of the other ones were just painful, especially having to sit through them 3 times.

The after performance discussion was interesting, since you are able to ask the choreographers exactly what they were trying to convey in the dance. One performance had a giant image of a multi-colored woman in the back and so I asked the choreographer what she meant by it. I was so disappointed to learn that the artwork had nothing to do with inspiring the dance- she just found it the day before. I thought that was tragic because that was the only thing that helped me to make sense of the dance. Here is Sarah and some of her fellow dancers at the discussion.


There were a few dances that I did not like- especially the first one where it begins and ends with a homeless bum on a park bench. The dancers then come in and out around the bench- it was just not very well done. I also didn't like the "I am a woman" dance where the girls yell out phrases like " I have a voice" and "I'm not a barbie" and "I am a woman"- I understood what they were trying to do to empower women but I actually think that they re-enforced stereotypes of women. It just got to be fairly annoying. The worst one was a dance where they literally just ran around in circles- different directions, and not even in interesting patterns. Having to watch these three times meant that we sadly started to really mock them by the last performance.

BUT- there were several dances that I really enjoyed. My favorites included- release (a modern hip hop), the sign language dance (they used sign language throughout the dance), the "trash" dance (called "under the tundra" where the girls wore skirts of spray painted plastic trash bags and moved like penguins/autobots)- check out Sarah here in this costume and one of the poses from the dance- definitely unique!

and then here are the Stults girls having some fun with dance


And here is the fabulous Sarah and my mom enjoying a well-earned celebration dinner at Sarah's favorite restaurant- Olive Garden.
Overall, it was SO GREAT to be able to see my sweet sister give such INCREDIBLE performances! I am so proud of my little dance major and had such a great time being with my family, although we wished William could have been there because he would have had some funny comments about all of it. At least he can watch the dvd of the performance over Christmas :-) But he can luckily fast-forward through the weird ones.