Unit 40 - Choreographing Skills: Rush

 Akram Khan's RUSH 

Rush Video Clip

Notes to think about when starting the review:

• India dance comptempary Kathak
•  -9 1/2 beats
• relation cannon changed of speed/temp retrograding
• blue wash/ plain
• repeating
• simple costumes
• options/backup
• star rating
• clips

My Review

Akram Khans’s Rush is in the style of contemporary dance, especially Kathak, which is a classical an Indian dance.

The dance is set as 9 1/2 beats and is performed in a trio. The stimulus for the dance and choreography is the idea of ‘free-falling’.

The lighting in Rush lit to be a blue wash and rather plain. This makes to stage look vey simple but shows bit of colour, maybe the lighting designer was trying to show some resemblance to the sky and link in with the stimulus and theme. The way the lighting has been done for this dance also makes it very easy to see the dancers and they do stand even when each dancer is wearing the same black costume on a black backdrop. I personally think the lighting is very effective. 

At the opening of the dance the lighting starts quite dark and brightens up as the pace of the music and movement picks up.

The music starts with the sound of swishing which connects and links with the movement. As the swishing noises increases and begins to sound like the wind you hear when you are going or jumping out of a plane, it matches in with the dances rotating their arms.

There are lot of choreographically devices used in Rush, for example ‘unison’. Unison is appears and is used in Rush when stillness and pauses happen, their left arms are in by the chest with the right arm extended out and stops. This use of union and pause creates an atmosphere of tension, very broken and being ‘on edge’.

The main device used in Rush is ‘cannon’, a lot of the time in this dance a short piece of movement is performed by one dancer and then is copied by the next straight after and so on again.

Akram Khan has tried to represent the movement when exiting a plane and starting the  ‘free-falling. He has done this by completely changing the dynamics of dance and especially by changing the speed and tempo. This is shown when the dancers perform their movements at a much faster pace, in unison as well, and begin to use a edge and slides of the stage and use the space a lot more effectively, just like having that space and freedom when jumping out of the plane. This shown very clearly to the audience and the audience can understand what is happening and going on. 

‘Repetition’ is another device used in Rush. This helps to highlight a specific and key movement, like when the dancers perform a motif when they are bent over with their arms spread horizontally. and os repeated. This movement  also reflects the mental and physical preparation a person think about and goes through in their mind before jumping out of the plane.

In conclusion to this review, I thought Akram Khans’ Rush was good. If I could change one thing it would be adding a few more dancers, I personally think this would be more beneficial as you could get separate different trio motifs and expand the cannons and unison parts of the dance too. This would bring a bit of more a visual aspect to the performance also.

Other peoples reviews - Professionals ones.

"he is classical and modern, earthy and mystical, sensuous and masculine, fluid and muscular and he embodies these dramatic opposites without any tensions." - anne sacks, london evening standard, 2 february 2001

(http://www.akramkhancompany.net/html/akram_production.php?productionid=15)

Rush is a new trio, and Khan’s first group choreography. The piece is stamped with Khan’s distinctive style of quickfire motion within fluctuating cycles of tension and reverberation, and while contemporary dancers Gwyn Emberton and Moya Michael suffer by the simple fact of not being Khan himself, they get impressively close to matching him.

The construction is tight and formal, phrases passed between the dancers, duets and trios splintering out of phase, interlocking and reforming. Yet in the end the work is more interesting for Khan’s idiosyncratic movement invention than for its composition. Perhaps this is only to be expected from his first ensemble piece – I’m reminded, for example, of Wayne McGregor’s initial forays into groupwork, similarly built around the highly distinctive idiom of their choreographer. McGregor has since considerably developed his compositional skills while maintaining his personal style, and I look forward to Khan’s future experiments in this direction.

Like the opening musical number, Rush is based around a nine-and-a-half beat time cycle (not that I could follow it). But by opening and closing in this way, the show suggests a journey away from kathak and a return to it, now intriguingly transformed. If kathak remains a source of inspiration and renewal for Khan, this programme also indicates that he’s gaining new ground with each loop of that creative spiral.

(http://sanjoyroy.net/2000/12/akram-khan-fix-rush/)

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Week 2 

• I learnt the pharse from Rush and developed it wit Sophie. 
• We used canon, repetion, changes of tempo and exploring extremes of speed.

Week 1 

• 
  
• Improv dance and learning the phrase from Kat and Sophie.
• Background & Quick Notes of the performance of Rush.