To celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, Bonnie and I got season tickets for the Carolina Performing Arts Series at the newly renovated Memorial Hall at UNC. We don’t see a lot of performance art, so it will be a good chance to see new things. My only previous experience at Memorial Hall was a Steven Wright concert about 15 years ago. Anyway, I’ll try relating some of the shows we attend for the equally unsophisticated reader.
The first performance of the season was modern dance by Ronald K. Brown/Evidence. I was a little dubious at the outset of the first piece — the dancers were all wearing various Saturday-afternoon casual clothes and barely in sync with each other, but eventually I saw those as intentional effects. The subsequent dances switched to more traditional modern dance garb while maintaining the loose synchronization as an interesting theme. Loose synchronization is certainly not doing them justice; what I mean is that the seven or so dancers in each piece would usually dance in seemingly independent rhythms and yet sometimes come together perfectly for a series of synchronized moves.
I’m sure each piece had some holistic meaning as well, but such things are beyond me. All I could appreciate (besides the obvious physical talent and execution) was the creativity exuded from the performers and the choreography. Some bits of that: changing subgroups of dancers, dancers coming and going from the stage (sometimes returning with a costume change), angles of presentation, music selection, and occasionally background images.
And most importantly, they looked like they were having fun.