Textual Analysis Of Water By Alvin Ailey

Since Alvin Ailey’s Revelations our American culture has changed in terms of access to technology and the opportunities social media provides choreographers such as the opportunity to perform in Justin Bieber’s Love Yourself music video. Keone and Mari Madrid are a married duo who had the opportunity to star in Justin Bieber’s music video and have created many other choreographies independently published on YouTube. I plan to focus on one video in particular that is part of a three video series titled “Water”. My focus will be the gospel music that both Mari Madrid and Alvin Ailey used in their respective piece and how the dance movements interact with the idea of water; Mari Madrid in “Water” and Alvin Ailey’s Revelations section “Take Me

Analyzing part one of “Water,” “...the question is not whether human bodies are obsolete, but how they can be redesigned, and how such incorporations of technologies change the stories we tell and dance about ‘being human’ in the twenty-first century” (Birringer, p. 92). Zooming in on certain parts of the body and only being able to see the upper body part of the female dancer bodies is a liberty Keone and Mari Madrid are able to experiment with. The camera begins in the water with Mari Madrid, her hands scooping water out from the river while she wears a loose upper half white and lower half khaki dress. By 0:22 the camera frames the river and greenery in the background; Mari and two female dancers enter the frame, their backs to the camera lens. Once in the water the three female dancers use their upper body, crouching forward and using their arms they move from near kinesphere to far up. After facing their attention up to the sky, as though praising the lord, they take a few steps forward and the next segment begins. The piece is made up of seven dancers, three females and four males, who are near the water one knee kneeling on the sand. Their movements are more fast paced moving from low level to middle level and crouching down to low level when the lyrics say “down in the river to pray”. The choreography and lyrics from the song move in unison, when the lyrics mention sisters the three females appear and when it mentions brothers the focus shifts to the four male dancers. The environment changes a couple of times and thus the viewer is transported from being inside the water out to the shore and then a field of grains where all the dancers perform together. The focus of the viewers is managed by the position of the camera and the post edits made possible with today’s