Living in New York City, we are really fortunate to able to see so many different cultural practices and traditions and diversity at large.

 Throughout this week, I had a lot of celebration to do. Not only was it my birthday, but also my dads and little cousins. For my birthday, I went clubbing and had a very interesting experience. I also attended a family party for my little cousins birthday party. Both were two extremely distinct experiences, and I would like to address the kinds of dancing that occur within cultures and the dancing tendencies that certain cultures have. I will be making general assumptions and stereotyping but also making keen observations as a dancer.

I realized I never wrote about Fall for Dance which I really enjoyed ! I love to watch dance and so I was naturally excited to go see Fall for Dance. Out of all the performances, my favorite was the reinterpretation of Afternoon of a Faun dance just because I thought it was really unique and different. It was quirky and odd and I was just staring trying to figure out what it all meant. I know a lot of people thought it was homoerotic, but I saw it different I thought it was more like two fauns loving and nurturing each other regardless of gender.

Even though we saw the ballet performance a while ago, the third act is still very vivid in my mind. I had never seen a ballet before, but I had certain expectations about what ballet would be like. I was not particularly interested in ballet, or in dance in general. I did not anticipate seeing anything like the last act – the more modern dancing. Instead, I had imagined the third act – the traditional ballet routine. When the couple came out and started to dance, or “float,” as I saw it, I was speechless.

     Joan Acocella states in an essay about music and its importance to Mark Morris, “Structure gives us freedom,” (166). Structure and freedom, however, appear to be in opposition of one another. Acocella contents that it is with knowing and understanding structure that we can learn to break it. In Mark Morris’ choreography, he loves the clarity of structure that is afforded by working with a composition of music. Moreover, his work is a, “physical act of musical understanding,” (162).