Pina 

I found this film on Pina to be incredibly vulnerable in its motives and passionate in its story telling. By watching this film one could tell what an important roll Pina played in all of their lives, especially when it came to their style of dancing and the emotional connection between themselves and their art.

I found the individual stories interesting because it gave every dancer the opportunity to display the feelings they had toward Pina, not only with their individual interviews, but also with their routines meant as a tribute to Pina. I also loved how they were all from different countries and spoke different languages. Someone commented in class that they also loved this characteristic of the movie, and then stated that they clearly all have to speak the same language to converse with one another. I think this is one of the main points in the film, that it doesn’t matter what language you speak because dance and emotions are felt worldwide and do not take words to express. They are in a sense their own universal language.

I also loved that the viewer was able to derive his or her own meanings from the dances. I know online there are descriptions of what each dance represents, but to me, knowing what was supposed to be intended ruins part of the abstraction of the art, and takes away the ability to create my own understanding of the piece. In class, a few of us discussed what we thought the very first dance was about, and all of us thought it meant something different. To me, this is the beauty of art, it’s ability to effect people by the way we view it through our own perspectives.

However, I did have a few areas of the film that I felt to be monotonous, but maybe that was part of the intended result? Pina had told them to feel a certain way, instead of creating choreography. So each dancer was moving according to his or her feelings, but I felt a lot of the style of dancing was the same. For example, the women walking, then falling while the man propped her back upright. To me this style was constant throughout the whole film. I think it could be looked at in a myriad of different possibilities. For example, having the consistent style could be to express life’s monotony, or even our own feelings of sameness. It could also be viewed as just a single style of dance that they were all trained in, or Pina’s influence of all the dancers, and her own personality reflecting through their movements, whether intentional for this film, or subconsciously built over time.

Although at times I felt this movie to be a bit strange, or maybe just not my style, I could still derive my own understanding from it, and it has helped me to look deeper into my own art form and apply more of my raw emotion and abstraction into it.