This is something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately…
I mean, like they say here, it’s not rocket science, when you have a large number of dancers things look pretty impressive.
Same as if you have great dancers, crappy choreography can look amazing.
Same as if you do very impressive tricks, crappy choreography will win you prizes! :p (maybe I’m not meant to say this things, oops!).
My point was to speak about choreography with big groups…
And don’t think I’m going to give you only bad examples of this! I started thinking again after seeing MacMillan’s Requiem at ROH the other day, and loving the piece with all the guys, and seeing the powerful effect that the first piece had, with all the dancers on stage. MacMillan was a genius, and way ahead of his time in choreography in my opinion, so that was a very good example of clever use of groups.
Other choreographers have very intelligent use of large groups too, Bausch or Forsythe come to my mind first, but they are certainly not the only ones.
But what I really wanted to say before I started going around as usual is… Are some choreograpers really getting away with anything just by using a large ensemble? Is there anyway for us to see large groups but still look for the detail?
I don’t want to focus on the negative part, we have enough of that, so I’m going to try and find ways to train our eyes to see further than the big picture, the impression of a big number of dancers.
I will try and find works to analyse that give us some kind of insight about the power of numbers. I have a couple in mind already, but do let me know if you have any suggestions!
I’m hoping to have the first analysis ready for tomorrow, so write to you soon!