This semester the RWU dance club show was titled ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’, a title that seemed a bit ironic after I walked away from the show. Truth is I still haven’t seen much of anything. The stage for the show, located in the field house, was just a black mat that protected the floor and the dancers throughout the show. This becomes a problem since the seats are set up in a crescent shape meaning if you weren’t in the front two rows a significant amount of your view would be blocked. They did have a TV screen set up but only on the left side, meaning if you were sitting on the far right you would have trouble seeing that.
I went to my first dance club show last semester with a Herald photographer, so we arrived early and luckily were able to get seats near the front. While I’m usually not big into dance, reading my article from last year you can see how much fun I had at the show. I left the spring show feeling like I wanted to dance, but this year I left with my body aching and generally annoyed. Taking the time to look back at both experiences I can see that my enjoyment of the event was entirely colored by my seat, and my view or lack thereof.
I was not the only one disappointed with my lack of view. Multiple people who had seats left them to sit on the floor in the walkways in hopes of getting a view. Even though they left their seats quite early on, none of the people without seats took them. Instead the seatless stood by the doors, next to the bleachers. The woman sitting next to me, whose son is a dancer for another school, said she had never seen a stage set up like this before and didn’t understand it at all. Even the people in the bleachers had difficulty seeing the show.
The poor sightlines were not helped by how packed together the seats were. I’ve heard from people involved that the show had reached ticket sales capacity, and you could feel that sitting there. I was quite literally shoulder to shoulder with the strangers next to me, and the lack of legroom led to my legs starting to hurt halfway through. I am on the taller side but not significantly so, and I have been able to sit comfortably in the field house for long periods before. I found myself having to leave halfway through the final presentation as I physically couldn’t bear sitting in that cramped space any longer.
During the show, there were gaps between each performance as the dancers had to run behind the stage to get to their places and get into costume. For most of the show, this was fine as it gave time for the rowdier crowd to cheer on their friends, and a graphic was put up on the screen showing who would be performing next. This gap did become a problem however between the last dance and the bows. This gap lasted for 3 minutes, during which the crowd sat in complete darkness, with no graphic on the screen, and nothing else listed on the playbill. This led to some confusion in the crowd and one person behind me even joked that it was a social experiment to see how long we stayed.
I do want to make it clear that none of my issues have to do with the dancers, from what I could see, all of them did an amazing job. If anything, the reason the seating made me so annoyed was that I wanted to see the amazing work they were doing. It is clear to me that they have long outgrown the field house and need a proper stage to start doing these performances on.
