Four Frames at CSULB Was Okay

If Cal State University Long Beach’s Department of Dance’s Four Frames From the Wide Floating Ground was part of a dance competition, they wouldn’t have won anything. It was a mixture of good and bad performances.

Four Frames From the Wide Floating Ground, a combination of four separate performances as part of four graduate choreographers’ theses. Graduate students Jenilyn Brown, Renee Murray, Sara Pfeifle and Sarah Wilbur devised their own choreography projects. Those students used Dance Department’s dancers as tools to present their work. Two shows were great and two shows were plain boring and annoying.

The first performance was the five-minute documentary film, Here Comes Everybody: A Wide Sky Dance Project.


“I liked the show, because I’m a Dance major,” Freshman Amanda Corrigan said. “I appreciate what they do.”

However, the dance presentation took a nose dive into plain boredom and annoyance with screeching balloon sounds in Will It Float? If you were in the audience, you’d want to take a restroom break to get away from the screeching sound when the dancers rub on the balloons.

“I did not like the balloon show,” Freshman Breanna Bruett, a Business major, said. “I found it irritating.”

Know One was slightly better than Will It Float? In this performance, the dancers appeared a bit more alive as they talked and danced. Their muscles appeared very prominent when they did Yoga-like movements. If you have ever taken Yoga, you’d know how darn hard it is to keep the body up when you just have one foot and one hand on the floor. Well, those dancers were able to do it within a heartbeat with no mishaps.


The last of the four performances, Slippery When Dry was the climax of Four Frames From the Wide Floating Ground where the dancers threw water around on stage, themselves and on each other which was reminiscent of what Blue Man Group does with paint.