19th April 2010, Shelton Square, Coventry
As I was walking home from work, submerged into my own thoughts and trying to ignore the pain in my legs, I stumbled across a dance performance in the centre of Coventry. After having a lovely chat with one of the volunteers, I gathered that it was a performance by the Vocab Dance Company as a part of the United Colours of Dance Out & About - an extravaganza of folk dances from around the world as a part of the International Dance Festival Birmingham, a one-month festival which will take place in April and May around Birmingham, Coventry, Stoke-on-Trent, Hereford and Stratford-upon-Avon.
United Colours of Dance Out & About will be bringing unique dance vision from Russia, India, Africa, Spain and Cuba, alongside many other most spectacular things to see, such as the dance circus, choreographed street dancing and riverdance legends. The Vocab Dance Company is a dance theatre group, founded by Alesandra Seutin, and created with a vision of fusing contemporary dance technique with African, Hip Hop, and physical theatre in order to create a unique and rich dance vocabulary.
 There is nothing quite like the feeling of complete and utter pleasure from being a witness to an absolutely raw and powerful African dance, expressing the most natural human movements, yet unimaginable to the regular person. Such strength and flexibility, such energy and passion. As the dancers move with the rhythm of African music, the viewers are overwhelmed by the pure joy and rawness of what real life should look and feel like.
It is exceptional how the human body can move like that with no evident effort and seem like the most natural thing in the world. There were no spectacular moves, impossible to imagine, but the simplicity and flexibility of every little muscle and the movement of every little piece of the body was creating the most beautiful atmosphere to be a witness to. This kind of dance reminds of the grace of the gazelles, panthers or swans in the animal world, where nothing too special seems to be happening, but brings immense beauty to the eye and creates a feeling of harmony, peace and absolute, just absolute joy.
 The dance was a combination of contemporary style and African movement and flow, which overlapped with what was expected out of African dance - that is to say the idea of how the movement and rhythm would be was correct for most of it, although the combination with contemporary dance and hip-hop did move it away from pure African at points. When it comes to the location, I suppose it took a little out of the impression and feeling, as it was a day performance on an open square and it would have been a lot more impressive at night or in a closed space with the right kind of lighting and surround sound. But it was not impression they were after, but to popularise international dance styles and way of movement and to show how each country is unique in its own way and beautiful through dance.Labels: events reflections |
