The Carolinian [October 27, 2009]

              THIS WEEK: · Oct. 27- Nov. 2, 2009
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WUAG
voted
among the
Triad's best
Shawnee Becker
Staff Writer
UNCG's own WUAG has been
voted Greensboro's best col­lege
radio station by News and
Record readers. They have also
come in with an honorable men­tion
at third place in the Best Sta­tion
overall category, beating out
commercial competitors whose
frequencies allow for a broader
listenership.
ALL DANCE PHOTOS COURTESY OF MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY
The Martha Graham Dance company, pictured above, performed in Aycock Auditorium last Saturday. The company is considered one of the best in the world.
General manager Jack Bon­ney
says of the vote "We have
won the Go Triad! best college
radio station in the past- we ac­tually
won first in '05, '07, and
now '09 and second place in the
even years- '06 and '08. But we
are much happier, more excited
and surprised to come in third
behind Rock 92, and WKZL .
People genuinely voted for us
because they think we are one of
the best radio stations. And to be
competing with commercial sta­tions,
when we have such a low
frequency- You can only hear
WUAG for about 15 miles be­hind
the city, and some of these
bigger stations you can hear in
Burlington, High Point, and
even Winston- so for us to only
be heard in Greensboro and still
be in third is pretty impressive."
John Sanford Friedrich
Staff Writer
The ghosts of a dead genera- -
tion danced for the hundreds of
people attending last Saturday's
performance by the Martha Gra­ham
Dance Company in Aycock
Auditorium. Unlike writing,
painting or sculpture, dance is a
very ephemeral art form - noth­ing
is left of each dance except
an empty stage when it is over.
This made the performance of
pieces which first debuted be­tween
a century and 60 years ago
all the more uncanny. Beginning
with examples of how dance was
conceived of and produced over
a hundred years ago, when Mar­tha
Graham was a student, the
audienc;e can see just how much
the art form has evolved in the
last century. Incense was first
premiered in 1906 by Ruth St.
Denis. Dance has grown to be a
very sparse and raw art - there is
very little for the viewer to see but
the body and its motions. It was
not always this way, as in Incense
employed a variety of props that
would seem more in place with
theater, including one female role
who was draped in shrouds and
wielding a hand-fan, a male with
bronze ringlets and the principle
THE CAROLINIAN
ESTABLISHED 1919
VOL. XC
ISSUE 10
role, a kind of priestess, who was
ritually burning incense at an al­tar,
despite how nervous the peo­ple
who manage the theater must
have been at the notion of a real
fire on the wooden stage.
Being a harem-slave to a Sultan
is not - the
type of sub­ject
matter
you'd ex­pect
to see
as the basis
of a dance
today, but
in the per­formance
of
one of Gra­ham's
oldest
pieces Tana­gra
we see
the playful
but clearly
seductive
motions of
just such
a dancing
slave. Wearing bells on her an­kles
and very little else, Jacquelyn
Elder swayed and teased the au­dience
all while retaining some
feisty independence. The crit­ics
of 1926 may well have found
this scandalous. Unfortunately
this was merely an excerpt from
a longer choreography, and this
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audience was not able to see how
she ultimately -expresses or re­solves
her captivity.
Martha Graham is considered
_to be the woman who put the
"Modern" in Modern Dance and
this was made evident during her
ground­breaking
piece Lam­entation.
A
person who
is drawn to
creating
dance as an
art form is
someone
who revels
in the pos­sibilities
of
the human
body, its
freedom
and grace.
Lamen-tation
is
not only
disturbing in its own right, but
must be even more repugnant to
a dancer. Sitting on a public-style
bench for nearly the entire piece,
the dancer struggled and writhed
beneath a purple tube of clot_h
that left only her fingers and face
exposed. Stretching the prison
around her, she is ultimately un-
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able to escape but does succeed in
showing the audience her agony
and create an emotional bond.
A stationary and frustrated piece
like this did clearly break with
the notion of dance as a work of
mere beauty or entertainment.
As Fascism spread across Eu­rope
and the world readied once
more for war, Graham's Steps in
the Street captured the pessimis­tic
attitude that all freedom-loy­ing
people must have felt at the
time. Specific to the history of
the art, in this piece Graham has
over a dozen identically black­clad
female dancers perform like
a single mechanized unit. Some
individuals would fall out of
maneuvers and the rest would
follow as blindly as a good sol­dier.
Strings of women carrying
out the same sharp and at times
violent motions created quite a
scene and is important to note
because while not rejecting aes­thetics,
Graham here rejected
the notion that female's bodies
must be employed to make weak
movements. -•
WUAG is an almost entirely
student-run organization, the
only exception being Bonney,
who came to the station several
years ago. There are both two
and three hour radio shows all
run by student DJ's. The late
night shows and weekend shows,
called "specialty shows", cover
everything from French mu­sic
to sports to music about US
presidents.
Earlier this decad_e, three young
choreographers were commis­sioned
by the Martha Graham
SEE MARTHA ON PAGE TWO
ON THE WEB AT:
"The station has gradually
changed;' Bonney said. ·~we've
changed frequencies three times.
SEE WUAG ON PAGE TWO
::: ' ·. =~·: - ::;-