Stravinsky, Balanchine, and Agon

Download or read book Stravinsky, Balanchine, and Agon written by Jacob Fitzpatrick and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agon (1957) is a ballet with music composed by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by George Balanchine. If we understand Agon as an interdisciplinary work, one consideration is how to address music and dance in a way that allows us to form meaningful connections between the two. One such link between music and dance is the concept of movement. While there are many ways that we can discuss movement, one prominent form of movement analysis is called Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). The LMA branch of effort can form a connection between music and dance because it addresses not the bodily or spatial patterns of movement, but rather the qualitative ones. As a case study, this dissertation focuses on a single dance in Agon, the Saraband Step. Chapter 1 begins with Stravinsky's score and considers what it means to understand music as movement. Chapter 2 introduces LMA and shows how we can hear effort in music by using the four motion factors (weight, time, space, flow). Chapter 3 explores the mimetic hypothesis. It then uses this hypothesis to bridge our understanding of effort that we hear in music to effort that we see in dance. Chapter 4 is an analysis of Balanchine's choreography and shows how the choreography forms a narrative with movement and space. And finally, Chapter 5 introduces the notion of choreomusicality. It explains how effort can be a tool that invites us to discover choreomusical relationships between music and dance.