A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a very interesting show. It was not the typical version of the play; it was more of a Beatles remix. Once again it was not a show with a great deal of dancing, but it did seem to have more than the last show I went to.  The dancing portions consisted of ballroom dancing, court dancing, social dancing and a dance of the fairies. The very first sort of dancing I noticed was performed by Puck. I thought of it more as social dancing because it was fearless. By fearless I mean it is the kind of dancing where you can just go crazy, let loose, and just have fun. There was not any sort of technique, and it really did not have to go with the music. When the fairies first start to enter the show, their grand entrance was a little dance number. I would say it was probably closer to a more modern sort of dance. It was obvious there was a small amount of ballet influence, but it broke away and became more upbeat and had more natural movements. I noticed now from both performances that anytime a new love is introduced, there is ballroom dancing. After the couple ran away because they were not supposed to be together, they ran into the forest and (being a new happy couple) danced. The second out of three fairy dances ended with the fairies joining in on ballroom dancing. The last of the dance performances by the fairies was once again a more modern sort of dance, this time because of the creativity. The fairies had very natural movements as they did before, only they took it to a new level and danced with long pieces of painted fabric. With the use of fabric they were able to create a variety of shapes and eventually ended up looking like fairy wings. The last dance performance of the show reminded me of a court dance.  In it was the king and queen, with their subjects below them; all dancing in celebration. They danced male and female, but was more of a modern day court dance like you see and the end of movies. They stood in lines and each couple rotated their way to the front. In all, it was a great ending performance to the show and it was obvious that each dance performance was inspired by other genres.