Practitioner Study (7)

 The piece I have chosen to research this week of Christopher Bruce's is Ghost Dances running approximately 30 minutes and first performed by Ballet Rambert on July 3rd 1981. Ghost Dances gets its story from the Chilean military coup in 1973 and the torture and murder of a popular singer, song writer, and poet, Victor Jara. Bruce met with Joan Jara, his widow who told him her story and gave him a copy of an unfinished song that was about her life with Victor. Bruce described Ghost Dances as a statement human rights but mostly how normal people get caught up in political oppression and fighting. (Foyer, M. 2015) Bruce wanted to depict this specific event but not limit the meaning to only Chile thus using folk dance (Rambert, no date) which is far from the other piece I have studied 'Rooster'.

Ghost Dances is certainly different to Rooster in many ways. Rooster to me felt very carefree and light-hearted whereas Ghost Dances had a very solemn  message about it. I think with Ghost Dances Bruce was trying to create awareness of what happens everywhere in the world thorough the power of dance. I observed in my watching of Rooster that it had more jazzy and sharp movements emulating the atmosphere of the new wave of life in the 60's (Timbadia, S. 2016) meanwhile the movement vocabulary for Ghost Dances includes folk and social dance combined with ballet and contemporary to give the air of Chile but not limiting it to there specifically (Rambert, no date). Ghost Dances is significantly popular around the world with it being on the English school curriculum and it being performed at the Edinburgh Festival and in Denmark, Washington Dc, and Canada. (Foyer, M. 2015)


(No date) Ghost dances by Christopher Bruce Study notes - rambert dance company. Available at: https://rambert.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Ghost-Dances-Study-Notes-1.pdf (Accessed: 19 November 2023). 


Foyer, M. (2015) Christopher Bruce’s ghost dances, Playbill. Available at: https://playbill.com/article/christopher-bruces-ghost-dances (Accessed: 19 November 2023). 


Timbadia, S. (2016) Sympathy for the devil - analysis, dance-journal-year-2. Available at: https://simrantimbadia.wixsite.com/dance-journal-year-2/single-post/2016/01/03/Sympathy-for-the-Devil-Analysis (Accessed: 19 November 2023). 


Comments

  1. Anonymous19 November 2023 at 06:18

    I enjoyed learning about Ghost Dances. How have you used Christopher Bruce’s pieces and style to impact your own choreographic process?

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    Replies
    1. rachel stanford19 November 2023 at 06:57

      In our choreography we have implemented numerous aspects of Christopher Bruces stylistic features and taken inspiration from both of the works we have studied. Due to our choreographic storyline having two contrasting motifs we wanted to examine where Bruces works fit in ours. For the violence aspect of our piece we took inspiration from Rooster, Bruce used sharp static movements to show new life in the 60s (Timbadia, S. 2016) and we used it to show intensity and roughness dipping in and out of it throughout our piece. In our peace sections we looked as Ghost Dances' flowing, more contemporary/ballet movements and the quietness of it all and felt that would really work well for our softer section.

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