Video: Techniques for Working on Phrases in Modern Dance

Learn how to work with phrases in modern dance routines in this free modern dance video.

Video Transcript

On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Benjamin Ford Asriel. I'm with Dance Lab NYC here at Stepping out Studios. And today, we'll be talking about post modern dance. Great. So what I'm going to show you is the beginning of something that we often call a phrase. Similar to music, dance pieces are often put together by making a phrase. Where a section of movement that is a basic movement. And you can do a lot with phrase work. You can do it; for instance, this was on the first side. I could do it on the other side. I could step on the left foot first and move it to the right. I could also do it backwards. I could retrograde that movement. Except that I didn't do it right. If that is the movement, then this would be the retrograde. And so I could also retrograde it to doing it there. I could retrograde it on the right side. That's something that Twyla Tharpe does a lot in her movement. But it also comes from musical forms. You can do the same thing by inverting your movement by playing backwards. So you'll see in the phrase I'm going to do in a moment that there's a lot of play with texture in the space. There's a lot of play with where the initiations are coming from. And I'm just really interested in studying how the flow moves in the body, from someone who's walking.

Techniques for Working on Phrases in Modern Dance

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