Dance Like a Man

In this reflection response, you’ll reflect on our discussion of Dance Like A Man and how the uses of costume design engage the audience with the conflict in the play. The play is a family drama set in an India long after Independence but feeling the growing impact of globalization. The characters are negotiating the family codes of the past, the present, and trying to create a future. The cultural pressures are both colonial and traditional. The costumes are carefully designed to connect the characters with these social ideas. You can take up this ideas in your paper, or draw your own unique connections to your cultural context.  Preparation Process Think through the following components when watching the assigned clips. This personal research is an important step in formulating your thoughts on the film and its techniques.  Affect: Watch the assigned video clip first and let it just wash over you. How did it make you feel? What images or sounds caught your attention? Do your feelings change part way through? Who are you feeling for? What are you feeling about? Analysis: Watch it again and observe the strategies the artists are using in telling their story. Then watch it again focusing on the week’s particular design or performance element. Identify the specific strategies. Reflection: Think about the strategies of the artists and your emotional response. Do you think you felt what they wanted you to feel? Was there something in your own perspective that resisted what they were doing? Did their strategies make you feel things you didn’t necessarily want to feel? Connection (2 related levels): How does this moment in the play, performance, or film relate to the play, performance, or film, as a whole? What is the play, performance, or film about? How does the play, performance, or film relate to its cultural context and to your cultural context? What dominant ideologies, and cultural narratives are at play? Writing Process Your paper should integrate the results of your personal research process above. It should begin with an articulation of how you responded emotionally to this moment (your experience of the affect). It should then proceed to a close analysis of the strategies at work in this section of the play, performance, or film, that uses the languages of performance of design taught in lectures and modules for that week. The analysis should connect to your des?r?ption of the affect. (NB: you do not have to feel what you think they are trying to make you feel, just note the disconnect and reflect on why.) Then connect that analysis to the play, performance or film, as a whole, and your understanding of its social objectives, its cultural context, and its place within your cultural context.