Music & Dance
Storified by YuDing · Sun, Mar 27 2016 22:37:54
Ballet
Swan Lake, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1875)
SwanLake is a famous ballet which was composed by Russian musician Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1875, the Romantic period. The plot of this ballet was derived from Russian folk story about the love line between a prince and a princess Odette who was turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer. The excerpt which I chose is from Act 2, and is about the prince promises to Odette that he will defeat the sorcerer and save Odette and her friends, because of that, four little swan are falling into lively dance.
The texture of the music in this excerpt is homophony, which mainly has a repeated main ascending melody and a horn like music accompanied, and it is in duple meter. The whole emotion for this excerpt is delight and joyful of four little swans’ expects for their bright future. Thus, no matter the music or the dance,all of them express pleasure on inside and outside.
In the whole performance, we can see four ballerina going on holding hands and keeping the same dance steps. At the same time, it maintains highly consistency with the music: In some repeated part of the music, the dance also repeats the same step. According to this feature, this ballet dance can be considered as choreography. Since these four ballerina represent four little swans, they dress in white ballet dress and dance in lively and light steps to convey their pleasure to the audience. Their every single step is following the music beat,and some of their dance feature are just like the swan’s movement. One obvious behavior is ballerina move their legs side to side, which let me connect with the swan will swing their leg after drinking water. How interesting and vivid it is! The crisp rhythm of the dance as if depicts the scene of four little swans dance nearby the lake, which is moving and poetical.
Pop Music Dance
Ringa Linga, TaeYang (2013)
This is a music performance video of Korean popular music singer TaeYang (Dong Young Bea). He released this solo song called “Ringa Linga” in 2013, which is a mix of trap, dubstep, electronic musicand hip-hop. Its main idea is about an excited and malty man revels in the dancing floor.
This song has a strong beat with duple meter, and was composed in A-B from. In order to stand out the singer’s voice, this song uses homophonic texture with solo human voice singing the main melody and some special electronic instruments accompanied. It is interesting to notice that its rhythm is not always keep the same fast tempo in the whole song, instead of inserting some slow and lyric parts in the excited and energetic music. This is a way to express the brief oxygen-starved of the man’s brain after furious dancing. We also can see this feature from its dance in the video.
“Ringa Linga” ’s music performance video was shot inside and outside of a garage. Because it isa performance video for audience to see its dance step clearly, it simply adopted one take way for giving audience a straightforward visual experience,and its black and white color strength this concise sense.
The dance of “Ringa Linga” is a mix of choreography and gesture, which purported to behave the strong sense of pulse of music with human body. Two great ideas in this dance are needed to point out. One is the consistency of the music and dance. This song has several repeated part, which is called high light, and the dance inhigh light part is fixed. We can see when high light appears, dancers dance thesame dynamic and mobile choreography. In this way, both the dance and the musicleave the strong impression in audience mind. Another one is what I havementioned before, at the slow part of the music, the dance will change fromorderly and strong beat group choreography to gentle and solo gesture dance. As far as I understand, the lithe solo dance is a vivid behave of brain oxygen-starved,which is also a consistency of music and dance.
