Dance Show Review: Billie Holiday Alive

For my second dance show review, I went to Hollywood to watch a show called Billie Holiday Alive. This show was a performance of Billie Holiday’s greatest hits accompanied with dancing as someone portrayed Holiday and lip synced her songs. The show also took time to tell the audience an abridged life story of Holiday between each musical and dancer performance. This show was quite unique because it utilized hologram technology to show someone who portrayed Billie Holiday. It also used live dancers to accompany the hologram performance. It showed the growth from Holiday’s time to the present and her influence on how singers sang and what they sang.

The set for this show was very simple, but it helped to put the audience in 1940s. On the stage,

They would dance contemporary to Holiday’s slower jazz songs, which were also her songs with the most serious stories told in them. Performing this style of dance helped to tell the story of hers songs. The dance truly helped to accentuate the message of the song “Strange Fruit.” This song describes the horrific lynchings that took place in the Jim Crow South. The contemporary choreography to this song showed the sadness and confusion that many people felt towards the lynchings. The dancers would come onto the stage in small groups of two or three, and I noticed many of them would do a slow, controlled grand battement followed by dropping their torsos to their feet when they brought their legs back down. They would then proceed to exit the stage, and be followed by the next group of dancers. When I watched this, I felt as though the dancers were showing the pain and despair that people felt before lynchings, and how they next lynching would happen soon

Since the time period of the show was the 1940s, the woman portraying Billie Holiday wore a very elegant evening gown that sparkled in the stage light along with what appeared to be a large flower clip in her hair. The male dancers wore slacks, button-up shirts, suspenders, and loafers. The female dancers wore dresses what went past their knees, characters shoes, and stockings. Some of the female dancers also wore some type of hair piece. The costumes were tailored perfectly for the dancers. They were fitted nicely around the dancers bodies, but it never prevented them from being able to fully perform. They were able to do all of their battements, pirouettes, and sautes with ease, or at least, that is how it appeared to