Urban Nights Dance Fusion

When I walked into the Urban Nights Dance Fusion show last Saturday night, I was anticipating an exciting night of immersion in an eclectic array of modern dance, though it was not clear to me what the nature of the performance would be. Would there be a unifying theme to this collection of dances, or would it be more patchwork, hodgepodge, disjointed? The prospect of successfully combining the more traditional Cardinal Ballet with hip-hop, tap, swing, and other genres seemed very exciting to me, as a member of the audience who was most interested in seeing how these genres overlap, interconnect, and feed off of one another.

Overall, I was very impressed with the precision and grace involved in the Cardinal Ballet, and found myself most intrigued by the tap performance, as it was something I had never had the pleasure to see before; the intricacy of the rhythms was astounding. At times it appeared as though the dancer wasn't moving her feet very fast at all, but still, these incredible rhythms would sound. I can only imagine the amount of discipline it takes to make such an art look as effortless as they did.

Upon entry into the theater, I was supplied with a program, which listed each dance group and its theme (or title). Throughout the show, I tried to determine if there was a logical progression in the program; was it organized by theme, genre, skill level? By the end o the program I still wasn't sure. My best guess was that they put the groups in order of their anticipated appeal to the audience, culminating in, what i would consider to be a true fusion of genres in "Black Parade". In this final number, several of the dance troops  collaborated, utilizing their own unique styles in concert with one another, perhaps so as to show that, though each individual troop had its own style, they were all unified by their main goal: Expression through movement.

Flipping through the program, I also attempted to see if the respective titles of each performance were related to one another in any way. As far as I could tell, these titles were created independently by each individual troop, such that there didn't seem to be any correspondence between them. For example, many were self-titled (titled after the name of the group--Basmati Raas), some titled by the name of the musical number (Mack the Knife), and the rest of the titles were not apparently unified by any particular theme (Lo Que Es, The Shim Sham, Mongolian Chopsticks, etc.). It was like walking into an exhibit in an art gallery titled simply "ART": All genres, no historical time frame, no particular showcase of one artist's work. In this case I had walked into a performance of expression through movement titled  simply, "DANCE".

The groups who performed were Cardinal Ballet, Alliance, Basmati Raas, bent Spoon, DV8, Los Salseros, Stanford Chinese Dance, Swingtime, TapTH@T, Troposmatic, and urban Styles; at first it was difficult for me to see how these many and varied genres would fit snugly into one cohesive program. One of the main questions on my mind was what exactly does a "Dance Fusion" entail? Fusion--I thought to myself--doesn't that mean a blend of things? What they advertised on the front of the program was a "fusion"... for me, the connotations of that word reflected fluidity, smoothness, and ultimate cohesiveness. My reflection on the show, however, was that the transition were forced, and the segments jammed together; the performances felt less fused and cohesive than they felt slapped up against one another. Thus, in my opinion, the word "fusion" didn't represent what actually occurred, though this is subject to argument-- one could say easily make the point that fusion simply meant the incorporation of many different styles and means of expression. I had expected the entire show to feature numbers like the final "Black Parade" collaboration. Thus, the expectation I had, as  member of the audience, which had been cued by my interpretation of the title of the show, simply didn't match up with what i now presume the creators of the show had intended: A more divided approach, in which each dance group had their own miniature show within the larger show. In this sense, I suppose "fusion" was not intended to literally mean a number of genres smoothly blended together, but a collection, and subsequent juxtaposition of different styles--more or less a way for a large number of dance groups on campus to showcase their talents to a large audience.