Revolving Around Red Rover

This evening I participated in “Red Rover,” a traveling dance performance on the Stanford campus, and it was one of the best artistic experiences of my life. I wandered around campus with the audience, but behind my Nikon’s lens, creating a different experience for myself, one that revolved around a swirl of color, movement, and sound, rather than intricate thematic details.

            When I woke up this morning I was dismayed by (what appeared to be) rain clouds, however, by this evening the sky had cleared and was simply speckled with white clouds. As students, I feel that we often take for granted how beautiful and architecturally diverse our campus is, and “Red Rover” took advantage of this diverse beauty. There were a total of five dances, and student guide dancers led the audience across campus. These guide dancers were dressed in white and pranced around campus, perching themselves on columns, climbing on gates, and creating human chains to hold back traffic. They slithered between the audience and the dancers and heightened the sense of connection between the two groups.

            One of my favorite dances took place on the pavement between Meyer and the Law School. Six women in red shirts danced up and down the road chanting things such as “my body is meant to be here,” throwing books upon the ground, and smothering themselves with red paint. The dancers opened bottles of “blood,” finger painted their bodies red, and left handprints upon the ground. Their movements were deliberate and the dance illustrated the women’s power over their bodies. By this time in the evening, the sun had almost set and large flashlights illuminated the dancers. Because I was photographing the event, I was fascinated by the flashlight ringlets patterns on the dancers.

            The final dance, which took place inside of the red fountain near Green Library, was my favorite. There was only one couple in this dance and they glided in and out of the fountain’s boundaries, climbing up and down the stone stairs that surround the fountain. Visually, it was stunning. They were cloaked in white clothes that seemed to drip off of their bodies; they were surrounded by red, and illuminated by the fountain lights below. This dance focused the audience’s attention to the interactions between the two dancers’ bodies: the power construct between them continually shifted as they switched positions.

            I said at the beginning that I “participated” in “Red Rover” this evening, and while I had no official role in the piece, I still feel as though I participated in it… just by being in the audience. The dance was trading on the dancers’ interaction with their surroundings, which includes the audience. The surroundings also includes the sunset, and while the dance can be repeated, the sunset and the ambiance will never be exactly the same. Each dance was unique and the dancers employed not only their bodies, but also rose petals, flags, clothes, books, paints, flowers, and musical instruments such as gongs. It would have been easy for these dances to become over the top, but their balance between virtuosity and nature created a performance of understated beauty and sensuality.