event write up 2

This fall I attended the dance performance. I've learned an appreciation for dance at Mac thanks to one of my good friends who is a spectacular dancer and is involved in all of the dance productions. This falls performance, "Worlds Within Worlds", had two dances that are particularly salient to the themes of this class. The first dance, known colloquially around campus as "the naked dance", was a piece of art dealing with gender, sexuality, and the body. I haven't completely figured the dance out, nor will I, but I have managed to pull a few things out. First is the way that the naked bodies made explicit the role that clothing plays in masking the huge variety of human bodies. Clothing, whether we like it or not, serves in many cases (not all) to move bodies towards narrow, normative groupings. The way that people are socialized in relation to their clothing goes a long way towards erecting the heternormative gender environment we inhabit. On a completely different vein, the many bodies on the stage erased for a short time my habits of classifying bodies as "fat", "thin", "ugly", "attractive", "short", "tall", ect... classifications were eliminated by the freeing of mental and physical constraints. These adjectives, so often used to damage, are learned, they are not natural nor inherit in bodies but are written and spoken onto them. It was a powerful dance. The other dance worth analyzing was the dance in which 4 white women had a "goddess" party, dancing to what I'm told was "bollywood" music and putting on clothing of a sub-continental style (I think). This dance was problematic; it was performed with no acknowledgement of the way that the culture being performed was "otherized" by the dance. Whiteness got to pick and choose which pieces of the "other" to bring into its dominant narrative for a short period, after which they were cast back aside. To pull out a academic term, the dance smacked of "orientalism" in its depiction of an eastern dance/dress/culture. I haven't completely figured out what to make of this dance, but I do know that throughout and after alarm bells were going off in my head.