#dance debate

“Within these conversations, my colleague usually alludes to the fact that there are aspects of competition dance that go against what we, concert/academic dancers, feel is important about dance but also that it doesn’t lead to anything.

Competition dance ends at age 18. At that point, these dancers choose to buy-in to college dance or choose to let go of dance with few options in between.

As dance academics, this is often when we first interact with these dancers. We can be smug. Sometimes even smug enough to shake our heads when this adjustment is hard for these students and they wear their booty shorts to modern class.

Or we shake our heads because these students have an aesthetic cultivated over many years that hasn’t included any dance-for-art exposure. How low-brow.”

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“We, concert/academic dancers, have been reluctant to admit that the challenge of choosing a path happens to us but it isn’t when we are 18. It is when we are 25, 35, or older. It is at an age at which we are able to rationalize the meaning of dance in our lives and reflect how it has shaped our paths to successes we never imagined to have at 18, when we planned for exclusive careers as performers and choreographers.“ 

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“At this point, many of us are just as heavy-hearted and confused about what to do and how to do it as our 18 year old students grappling with the same question. The thing we have cared for so deeply seems not to exist in the way we perceived it and choices must be made.”  

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Preparing Hybrids for Their Futures

So how do I plan to prepare the Hybrids for a future different from my own path?

By collaborating with them.

By discovering with them the connections of our worlds and our aesthetics and the people that are making important work regardless of labels.

By giving them time and space to create, to make mistakes, to build references through technique and history, to introduce a myriad of processes for problem-solving and art-making.

By offering them an opportunity and responsibility to take control of their education, really, and allow them room to make good-dance that speaks to our audiences as well as our dancers. Even if it reaches beyond my taste. Especially if it reaches beyond my taste.

By expecting them to do something with their experiences- their mastery of the dance and the worlds they know.

By reminding them that art is cultural.

“The opening salvo of this year’s Dance Umbrella festival is definitely bold in its intentions. Unknown Pleasures presents a mixed bill of work created by five choreographers (four women, one man, ranging from their thirties to their seventies) who are not credited. Stage, lighting and costume designers, and musicians are all also anonymous. Strip away preconceptions, goes the thinking here, and you free the dance. Of course, it’s not that simple. It’s also throwing down a gauntlet – are you sufficiently au fait with contemporary dance to guess the choreographers’ “signatures”? (And you find yourself wondering, isn’t it odd that an anonymous show is dominated by women creators. How many male choreographers turned down the gig because they wouldn’t get their name in lights?)

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