I’m trying to look at the use of the body and space in performances that are non-verbal and compare them to performances that are verbal. I am looking at how successfully the actor is able to be awake on stage, and trying to decipher whether being awake is required for all performances or whether being awake depends of the degree of text being spoken.

I also enjoy watching the audience, and am thus keeping a third eye on actor – audience interaction, and audience response during the performance.

TILT a non-verbal dance performance. Here a team of 4 dancers, a musician, an interactive media designer / executer and a light designer / executer worked together in a 45 minute performance. I sat down expecting the 4 dancers to be alive from head to toe, brimming with energy one gets while dancing. I was waiting for them to interact with their interactive media. I was up front to see their eyes and look at where their eyes would focus.

Perhaps my mistake was to walk in – expecting.

The dancers repeated the same sequence of movements with only a slight variation in the 45 minutes, the interactive media was separate, alone and disconnected from the dancers – expect for one 2-minute interactive sequence. The dancers energy was from their feet till their shoulders - their faces where void of any expression. It was only once or twice that the dancers smiled, and that to seemed like a mistake, a slip when they caught each other’s eye. Even though they stood less that 2 feet away from their audience, and even though there were moments when the dancers were directly facing the audience, their eyes avoided any kind of contact. Their eyes stayed within themselves, and their faces blank.

Perhaps being a dance performance, is why, they used the entire space. They had marked out a white square of flex to dance on surrounded on all fours by black flex. The beginning led me to believe the white was the dance area, but as the performance continued the dancers extended the dance area to the black area, and at one point even to the wooden floor beyond the black flex. One could say this was part of the concept, but I have still not understood whether there is a bigger hidden meaning to the performance or simply a play with the movement sequence. One could say then due to technical difficulties the dancers where led to move off their dance area.

As a whole I was left with a dance performance। Nothing more। Nothing less.
~ anjalika