OVERVIEW

Dance teams are an exciting organizing system – they offer a fascinating form of entertainment that provides both the dancers and audience with a fun, uplifting experience. This case study will observe a specific dance that I had the privilege to be the male lead in this semester. Our dance set is called “Bring Me The Night”; we are part of the Dancewrx team, and we performed this dance in the Dancewrx Showcase in Berkeley this fall.

As a dancer, I had the opportunity to observe the entire Dancewrx team on different levels. On one level, I saw how all of the different dances (or sets) come together to form a showcase for the audience. I also observed on a much closer and detailed level how a specific dance, like “Bring Me The Night”, prepared for a showcase. As an organizing system, I discovered that the richest organizing principles and the interactions that they support are found at this lower level of abstraction.

WHAT RESOURCES ARE BEING USED?

There are three physical resources that can be found in this organizing system: dancers, props, and location. The dancers are the primary resources. They are by far the most important elements of a dance set for obvious reasons (without dancers, there would be no set), but also because the dancers contain resource descriptions (as will be mentioned later) that drive the organizing principles.

Props are also sometimes used in order to enhance or add an exciting element to the set. For example, in another set that I participated in, the men wore pre-ripped tank tops and at one point stripped them off and threw it into the crowd, much to the thrill and delight of the audience. For “Bring Me The Night”, however, there were no props used. Note that there is an important distinction between costumes and props: costumes are required and are part of the dancer, whereas props are optional and largely detachable materials.

Location or environment is a resource used for marking the placement of dancers. Different parts of the environment that surround the dancers can be used as points of references. For “Bring Me The Night”, we held practices on campus at Upper Sproul and used its various reference marks to remember where our placements should be.

Note the exclusion of one important individual: the choreographer. When discussing a single dance set, the choreographer is not a resource; he/she is actually the user, as the choreographer is the one who does the organizing.

WHY ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

The high level goal for this organizing system is to produce a dance that is pleasing and enjoyable for the audience and that satisfies the vision of the choreographer. However, on a more specific level, one will discover that there are 4 main goals that a choreographer hopes to achieve in a set: 1) fairness for all dancers, 2) conveying the theme of the dance, 3) proper execution of moves, and 4) cleanliness of the set. The interactions that occur in the set are motivated by and carried out with these 4 goals in mind, and “Bring Me The Night” is no exception. Choreographers may interact with individual dancers (to assess their execution and cleaniness), collections of dancers, and props (to demonstrate a move to the dancers).

It is important to note that these 4 goals often occur in separate stages, so that even though the interaction may involve the same agents, the purpose for each of these interactions is different. For example, a choreographer may interact with the same group of dancers in both the execution and cleanliness phases, but the purpose of the interaction for the former is to improve technical ability while the latter is to spruce up the overall piece in order to look good cohesively.

HOW MUCH ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

The intrinsic static and dynamic properties of the dancers allow the choreographer to apply different organizing principles in his/her set. These properties – which are also resource descriptions of dancers – include size and sex (intrinsic static), and skills and experience (intrinsic dynamic). In “Bring Me The Night”, the most prominent organizing principle was sex – there were parts of the piece devoted to just women, in which the choreographer loosely referred to as “the girls part”. The choreographer also used size as an organizing principle – it was apparent that the taller dancers were placed in the back. Note that in the domain of dance teams, being “placed in the back” for a set usually has a negative connotation. So this presents an issue for the choreographer: should a tall dancer always be placed in the back – even when he/she is relatively skilled – for the sake of making the set look good? If not, then at what point of the dance would it be appropriate to have taller dancers in the front? The choreographer on our team attempted to solve this problem by placing the taller dancers more towards the center at all times.

WHEN ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

The organization of the resources occurs during a phase of dance preparation called “blocking”. “Blocking” is when the choreographer places the dancers in specific positions. The dancers will invariably move around throughout the piece, but their physical locations and where they are supposed to be at any point in time remains constant.

However, when the interactions occur is largely dependant upon the choreographer. For example, the time in which a choreographer wants to interact with a single dancer versus a collection of dancers is never pre-planned; it is all determined on the fly. As the lead in “Bring Me The Night”, the choreographer often interacts on a one-to-one basis with me more than any other dancer, and often interacts in collections with the others.

WHO DOES THE ORGANIZING?

It is easy to assume that all elements involved in a dance set are resources – after all, from an outside perspective, it appears that all that is going on is a bunch of individuals lined up in formation and doing a set of relatively similar moves. However, this level of thinking is superficial and erroneous. As a dancer, I saw firsthand how all of the organization and interactions were driven through the choreographer. As mentioned early, the choreographer is also the user of the organizing system. In many ways, the choreographer is also the visionary; all of the organizing and interactions are meant to fulfill his/her vision of what the dance is to look like.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

Many elements of the organizing system here will not be carried over to a more collective level, such as studying the showcase as a whole. The most noticeable difference is that the user will no longer be the choreographer; it actually becomes the audience. In fact, the choreographer may himself/herself be part of the dance. At this level, the organizing system becomes very much like that of a museum or zoo, where the primary interaction becomes just observing the resources. According to the TDO, people often visit institutions with physical resources because “they value the direct, perceptual, or otherwise unmediated interaction that these organizing systems support”. This may not apply to the domain of dance performances, because although the resources are physical, there is no way for the audience to have any direct perceptual interaction with them other than simply observing with their eyes.