Middance provides lighthearted show

Middance, also known as Middlebury’s come-one-come-all dance organization, put on its fall performance over two shows in the McCullough Social Space on the night of Friday, Nov. 20. Centered on choreographed hip-hop dancing, the performance also featured a variety of other styles, from tap to classical to swing to traditional Irish dancing. Loosely titled “Good Girls Gone Bad” — a theme which primarily manifested itself in a series of Oscar-worthy skits threaded throughout the show — the performance represented the culmination of a semester’s practice of any duo or group interested in contributing a dance. The open-invitation nature of the performance meant it lacked the tightness of, say, a Riddim show, but the shows have a looser, easygoing feel, and are notable in that they provide a performance outlet for a more diverse range of style and people who love dance but do not necessarily have the experience or the time to commit to a group like Riddim.

Several of the dances performed by groups that do exist as independent clubs — On Tap, Irish Dance, and Classical Dance Middlebury, for instance — were holdovers from the ISO Cultural and Global Rhythms shows. In a way, Middance was similar to these shows, but instead of focusing on an array of global cultural traditions, Middance showcased what’s current in mainstream American hip-hop dance culture, replete with your pick of today’s leaders in ringtone rap. Aurora Adams’ ’11 and Elise Hanks’ ’11“You’re A Jerk,” for instance, was set to the New Boyz track of the same title, which is riding a wave of popularity derived from its tapping into the booming, Los Angeles-born cultural phenomenon known as “jerk” dancing, a distinct style resembling a collision between skater, hipster, and classic b-boy breakdance culture. Unfortunately, their dance did not actually feature any “jerkin’,” but its use of “You’re a Jerk” certainly tapped into a zeitgeist in hip-hop dancing in 2009.

I’ll confess: I don’t “get” dance. Show me a book, film, painting, song, play, television program, poem, etc., and I’ll rattle on about what I think the piece is trying to “say,” or its influences or its various successes and failures. But when watching dance I suffer an incomprehension that leads me, in most cases, to boil down a piece’s themes to either anger or sexuality, or both. So with something like the Middance show, I read the dances as broader cultural rituals rather than parsing the formal language of individual pieces of choreography for meaning. But in a way, hip-hop dancing, swing, tap and Irish dancing are more meaningful as expressions of a culture or of individual mastery than as authorial expressions of an emotion or theme.

Seeing the Department of Dance’s Fall Concert the next night was a different story — my inability to parse contemporary dance for deeper meaning led me to allow myself to simply be awash in the sensory beauty of a harmony between lights, music and movement, and comparing the show to the Middance one the night before was quite interesting. With Middance, the themes at hand were simple and accessible, the attitude usually resting somewhere on the narrow range of the dial between “sexy” and “badass.” But the expectation is not for an emotionally weighty work of art; rather, one attends to see their friends have a great time dancing around onstage and showing their worth after a semester of hard work and practice. Any other insight — into emotion, or into culture, as I mentioned before — is icing on the cake.