Brand new production 'Word!' recently performed at
DanceXchange, Birmingham to celebrate their 10th year anniversary by Vocab Dance Company is asking if it is in our power to do anything about negative stereotyping resulting from media portrayal of youth culture.
They do this through a lot of strong eye contact with the audience often with confused and angry facial expressions, vexed speech, abrupt yet rhythmic movement. Live harrowing vocals create a haunting atmosphere echoing deep disturbance within our youth culture, within ourselves.
Parts of this performance were powerful, forcing you to experience some kind of emotion in relation to the subject matter.
It left us questioning the appropriateness of using adults to portray what young people are feeling. We pondered on this by considering the choreographer Alesandra Seutin's intentions. Would using young people to play out their own anger and frustrations cause an emotional rather than an objective response thus affecting our abilities to discuss such issues objectively? If the piece is asking whether adults are responsible for the evolvement of youth culture, has casting adults made this question more poignant?
'Word!' was quite an aggressive attack on negative stereotypes within youth culture. For example - if you act scared of kids wearing hoodies, this can encourage them to act and/or be scary. We're not going to question the fundamentals of whether this is arguable or not here, but it may have been beneficial to include some positive representations of youth culture in this work in order to make us truly examine its portrayal in the media. Furthermore it seems contradictory to question negative stereotyping through staging a group of similar individuals (in terms of movement and costume), leaving us to question whether this piece perpetuated stereotyping rather than challenging it by presenting a more individualistic alternative.
At the end of this performance newspapers were torn up which left us with a sense of our power to do something about representations of youth culture. Maybe a reference to online media such as social networking would have been more current. Then again, given the vast multitude of media outlets in our society, this may have made it more challenging to leave the audience with this sense of empowerment.
Vocab Dance Company are a skilled, wholehearted, passionate and assertive group of performers. Alesandra Seutin uses the stage well and her choreography is heartfelt, meaningful and powerful. The performance did what it set out to do by reminding us of the stereotypes surrounding youth culture, their effects and whether we can do anything to make a difference.
