Broadway MusicalDance

Chapter 13

段馨君 Iris Hsin-chun TuanAssociate Professor

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

NCTU

• Our past is recorded in images of dance is old, for example women dance on the walls of Egyptian tombs.

• All the artistic principle of thought and conduct that regulate the musical typify romantic theater in content and form. Pablo Picasso - Les Demoiselles d Avignon .

• Dance transcends geography in a way that language can not.

• Dance humanizes expression in a way that music cannot.

cats musical-Memory

Elements

• Dance directs appeals to the imagination with conscious symbolic statements made through the extraordinary communicative power of dance forms, patterns, dynamics, styles, and virtuosity.

The Hot Mikado, New Thalian Players, 2006

• Form in dance represents the shape of the whole, that is, the structure of the dance in time.

• dance in the service of West Side Story might being with a meeting.

West Side Story-One Hand, One Hearthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A0fVWomF90&feature=related

West Side Story-One Hand, One Heart

• Within form, dance communicates through a systematic arrangement of position and step elements known as pattern.

• Dance reflects pattern in planned combinations of flowing or accented steps in symmetry or asymmetry.

The Hot Mikado

• A step involves the action of body movement that is to rest again.

• Those who dance the patterns within the form submit to principles of dynamics that control the relative force exerted by bodies in motion.

Hot Mikado - He's Gonna Marry Yum Yumhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcc9bOnK7NI&feature=related

Hot Mikado - He's Gonna Marry Yum Yum

• Style makes a statement independent of dynamic.

• Style is the specific manner of expression peculiar to a work, a period, or a personality.

Sunday in the Park with George http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVO9rN5Bk1A

Sunday in the Park with George

Language

• The elements of dance provided, theater choreography services the book through a vocabulary and grammar that embrace body position, simple movement, turns, jumps, and gesture. Broadway dance comes to the

bergenPAC when the New Jersey Ballet revives.

• The range of expression in dance images corresponds to the range of expression in music and literature.

Tony Awards： La Cage Aux Folles " We Are What We Are " I am What I Am "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3DlDRaPZLo

La Cage aux Folles Returns to Broadway. Is there a more appealing.

• The variety of dance images grow from the number and sequence of steps a choreographer chooses from the many available symbols in the language of dance. The Hot Mikado

Origins

• The dance of primitive self-expression and religious ritual adapted early and well to service in the civilized theatre.

Ruins of Phaestus

• One thousand years before the Dionysian festivals, music and dance entertainment pleasured audiences in the court theaters of Phaestus and Knoussus.

• As the masquerades, madrigals, and pageants of the Middle Ages grew into the extravagant and spectacular entertainments of the Renaissance nobility, dance assumed a more important place in the theatrical.

• The ballet was an integrated musical entertainment that employed dance as a vital instrument in the total expression of the theatrical idea.

Dramatic Functions• Where the nonlyric

theater employs dialogue and action to carry the plot another logical stage of development, the musical theater relies on song or movement.

West Side Story - Dance at the Gym - Tony Awardshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9esywf5GpU

Dance at the Gym

• Mood submits readily to dance expression because the human body registers in muscular tension and movement the visible impact of thought and emotion on a character.

• In Brigadoon, dance carries the show from the lively and joyful country dance directly into the ritual mourning of the “Funeral Dance”.

• Dance replaces dialogue with images of movement set to music.

• Movement forwards action more naturally than language.

• The choreographer must set up a visual situation and build into it an unsuspected visual response to elicit audience laughter.

• Visual images are more difficult to achieve in surprise situations than language.

Jerome Robbins

• Dance can keep the audiences.

• No device in the musical theater is more apt to generate the kinesthetic excitement that constitutes true spectacle than dance. Jerome Robbins Documentary

Jerome Robbins' Glass Pieceshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzkpmVIXQKo

Types

• Opening number from the bring-on-the-girls in a lively routine formula of early comedy.

• Modern musical theater eschews cheap entertainment for opportunity to demonstrate to the audience in physical terms.

Jerome Robbins, one of the most influential personalities of contemporary

• Performed by one person alone, the solo dance advances a single idea or character.

• Body positions, harmonious movement, and affectionate gesture are themselves the expressions of romantic love.

Fiddle-Dee-Dee

• Audiences accept male or female ensemble dance as an inevitable dance category because human beings tend to congregate in sexually exclusive group.

The King And I (The siamese version of Uncle Tom`s Cabin 1) con subtituloshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ekNKr8otk

The scenery centerstage is the gripped on "Small House of Uncle Thomas"

• In the production number, the entire dance ensemble contributes to purposeful spectacle.

• Dance has become as vital as song to the makeup of the mature American musical.