Final Note

Introduction

I have noticed that dance appears to have an image problem in the eyes of the general public. Dance appears to have trouble expanding its audiences past the group of fellow performers, dance students, arts administrators and intelligentsia that normally buy tickets, and seems unable to break into the wallet of the average Joe.

I believe that dance and music have gone in opposite directions - dance has gone towards the artistic and intellectual whereas music in general is getting more and more mindless by the decade, mass produced with little artistic content except on the fringes of the industry.

Therefore it is my view that dance, like music, is in need of some serious change, and to bring them back to full health and acceptance by the general public we have work to do.

The Demise of Music

The development of dance can be contrasted with that of music. In large part due to the industrial revolution, early portable means of music distribution such as phonographs meant that all could hear the great masterpieces of music. The later advent of radio, cassette players, and then CDs has of course made music in all its forms affordable and available to every strata of our society. It has become such a huge industry generating such phenomenal incomes, that the music peddled to the layperson (pop/rock music etc.) has now developed into a state where it has been engineered to sell records, not usually to provide quality or artistic excellence.

There is still plenty of high quality beautiful music available. However there are two obstacles to this becoming part of the general public vocabulary. Firstly, classical music is often appreciated largely by those who have had music or dance lessons as children - something that has only ever been available to the middle and upper classes. So 'art' is still seen as being for the intellectual and educated people. Secondly, due to what is pumped through most radio stations and TV music shows, the average person buys what is familiar and accessible. They are not thinking that they may be missing out, or that they are being used by the industry for their record-buying potential. However it is clear that art and/or quality are hardly in the picture any more in the dominant areas of the music world.

The Development of Dance

The industrial revolution also affected the way dance developed, mainly in the 20th century. As more and more people were brought up on rock and pop music, the great forms of recreational dance (social dance traditions such as the waltz, foxtrot etc.) that used to be taught in schools, and enjoyed at weddings and other occasions have died out almost completely. These days our weddings are sit-down dinners with a token boogie on the dance floor if you’re lucky! Together with the Jive and Lindy-hop, these older dance forms exist now as specialist forms of recreation and are seen as part of the dance and entertainment world which are largely removed from the lives of most people.

Perhaps the current pre-eminent form of social dancing is raving. Raving is great fun and I am glad that it exists, but it is part of a marginal and often secretive, cliquey subculture which cannot be classified as accessible to the general public or amenable to becoming part of the average life. This is true especially with the drug connections of raves, which most people prefer not to be involved in.

The simple fact is that dance itself is still as marginalised today as it was in the enlightenment, only available to those who have the financial resources to go to the theatre, the ballet, the contemporary dance show, or to send their children to dance classes. The introduction in the past 10 years or so of dance into the public school curriculum is a positive step forward, however there is a long way to go. The prevailing attitude amongst average people in the Western world is that dance is a foreign mode of communication, and I firmly believe that this is because it is no longer part of the every day experience of most people. People have lost touch almost completely with their bodies and their own capacity for physical expression, due to the shift in focus of most careers, (ie people do not so much work on the land any more, as behind a desk) and a lack of education.

The dance world must also accept responsibility for their own decline, which I believe can be in large part attributed to an unfortunate tendency towards introspection and developing 'art' - when what is really needed, if dance is to grow, draw audiences and survive, is to create shows that the ordinary average Joe feels drawn to. We can only do this if we speak a language the average Joe can understand, and it is clear that the dance techniques taught in the major dance schools around the world do not fulfil this function. Neither do the methods of choreography being practised in the profession and being taught in dance schools, which are geared towards producing 'art' rather than communicating to the man on the street. Unfortunately we are now in a situation where the man on the street will rarely think about going to see a dance performance, because they are afraid that it will be weird, boring, and/or incomprehensible. Dance and Man have, over the last three centuries, been slowly but surely growing further and further apart.

Dance Technique is Not Enough

So what can we do to communicate to the man on the street? This was the question I asked myself when I began to choreograph, and I think the answer lies partly in what is currently labelled 'Dance Theatre'. I believe this is one of the most successful ways to go about creating work that is accessible to the general public, because it is a form that lends itself to clear communication. The rest of the answer, I believe, is rooted in some fundamental changes both in the dance industry and in society itself. Those discussions will be tackled in another article!

The path taken by much musical theatre (Cats, Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera) is to have a story scripted through songs and expressed using a fairly even mix of dance, drama and music. This path can be taken further into the dance arena in a way which is often utilised by Sydney Dance Company’s Graeme Murphy (although I believe that Murphy’s choreography and SDC's marketing still place him firmly in the realm of theatre which is not seen as generally accessible), whereby a story is clearly communicated through the interactions of characters played by the dancers and characterisation based on the way each character interacts and moves. In this type of production the quality of movement of each character helps to define that character's personality, motivations and place within the story. This type of performance can be quite easily put together by a director or producer and need not demand any more in terms of its 'movement innovations' than what the already widely taught dance techniques can offer. With use of costumes, narrative, well chosen music and settings, a perfectly good dance theatre production can be staged.

However with time and attention paid to quality, depth and innovation of movement (as we shall see), it is eminently possible to communicate to the average Joe in a way he can understand (and even more effectively than using only established dance technique) without necessitating the stagnation of dance technique and development. What I am talking about is what I call physical eloquence, and I believe that this is the essence of what dance should be. There are a few people who are born with this gift, but for most of us it requires years of training geared towards the goal of intimate understanding of our bodies. It involves a training of the mind as well as the body; there are plenty of world-class dancers who would possess the knowledge I refer to but are unable to tap into in and utilise it in the way that I am going to try to explain to you!

Physical Eloquence

Martha Graham used to say 'the body does not lie' and I believe there is a lot of truth in her statement. Body language can make up 80% of what is communicated between two people when they are speaking face to face. Our bodies, contrary to what many orthodox doctors may profess, are intimately connected with our emotional, spiritual and physical state. We cannot separate these aspects of our composition, as evidenced by our bodies’ tendency to show the signs of whatever kind of stress we may be going through, and the way the defences of our immune system are lowered during emotional crises and other traumas, to name just a couple of examples. When you apply this statement to the dance we see onstage, a number of interesting observations emerge.

The most compelling dance performances I have seen (as evidenced from my reviews also published on this website) are where the dancer onstage is clearly having an absolute ball doing what they are doing, and the movement appears to spring spontaneously from their unbound joy. These are the performances where you feel a compelling urge to get up onstage and join in because the dancer looks like they are having so much fun!

The type of movement I am describing is usually completely free-from and unfettered by any idiom of dance technique. The most obvious reason for this is that as soon as one uses the recognisable form of, say, classical ballet, or Graham technique (Graham technique was not always this way - it was developed in order to achieve the type of communication I am talking about. However the preservation of Graham technique as a static/stagnant institution has robbed it of its freshness and its power to communicate. Perhaps it would have been better if it had never been institutionalised!), we have put a frame around the picture, imposed a formality upon the movement, which removes it from its raw, primal state and necessitates translation in order to understand it.

What is just as compelling, if not more so, is when the movement you see, whether recognisable as the style of a known technique or not (more usually not), is, or appears to be, the involuntary expression of what is passing through the dancer's mind or heart. This type of performance is so compelling because it eliminates the need to think or understand what is happening - the dynamic of what you see onstage bypasses the mental and goes straight to our heart where it needs no translation - it is recognised by our own involuntary emotional response.

I am sure you see the power of this type of performance when presented to Mr Average Joe in the context of a show that portrays a story, circumstance or theme that he can relate to. What you then have is a frame of reference that is familiar or recognisable to him, coupled with movement that clearly speaks to him, bypassing the brain and shooting straight for the emotional jugular. Mr Joe thinks, 'Wow, I really understood what he/she was feeling, especially after (X) had happened to them earlier' or something similar. Dance has shot a goal into the communication goal ring!

Because of the removal from recognised technique, it takes one of two things to be able to achieve this physical eloquence that is so rare. First, as I have said, there are a very few people who are born with such a tactile relationship with the world and their own bodies that, when brought into a dance context, they naturally have the talent to communicate this way. Secondly, which is what most of us must work towards, is the deep kinaesthetic understanding, achieved after years of training and studied investigation, of our own bodies, muscular responses and functions - the way we are hung together, our own mechanics and what we are therefore capable of doing with all those nuts and bolts.

This process will not occur just through doing dance classes. A dance class is usually (although not necessarily) essentially the same as an aerobics or gymnastics class – various physical exercises performed in a proscribed style and to appropriate music. In order to use a dance class for our purpose, an applied mental concentration throughout the class is necessary, as if one were tracing the messages from brain to muscle in order to more deeply understand the workings of the machine we inhabit. And that alone is not enough - we must engage in experiments to discover our bodies’ entire movement potential, not just that held within a set technique, but every tiny possible movement within the bounds of human capability must be explored, and then (and this is the real challenge) we must learn how to exploit them for their appeals to different emotional and mental responses. This takes practise both in the studio and on the stage.

As I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of world-class dancers who would already have this knowledge, however, being what some might call virtually indoctrinated into dance technique, they would not understand how to use their bodies in the way I have described. I have worked with such dancers and it is an uphill battle. There are hundreds of degrees of understanding falling at all the various points in between ignorance and complete mastery of the art I am describing. Some indeed are so talented (though I have never seen her dance, I believe that Gelsey Kirkland, Balanchine's Muse and Baryshnikov's partner, was one of these) who can create this type of magic even within the strict disciplines of classical ballet or other dance techniques. But for most of us it can be achieved, with enough work, simply through the physicalisation of our own emotional responses. In this way we can communicate to the masses in a way they will automatically understand.

Final Note

Please understand that I am not anti-art – art is necessary to Man, however I believe that it has lost its way, catering for the artists rather than the common man. Also I am not anti-dance technique, I just hope we can learn to use it wisely and to discard it at will in the interests of communication – but most importantly, to understand that it is just a means to an end. Too often we as dancers become so obsessed which achieving perfection of the technique that we forget the reason we are learning it! I strongly suspect that when artists focus on communication – done effectively and with a message worth knowing - rather than creating what the establishment calls art, it will be the cause of the next renaissance of the arts in our society.

Creating a culture that embraces dance on every level will take much more than the development of the individual artist that I have described in this paper. It will involve a long process of educating the public, which will take decades, together with some serious changes in the dance world, the way we train people, and the attitudes within the industry. Other changes that are necessary include a re-think of the way dance companies are run and perhaps most notably the way dance is marketed. I also believe that much government funding is seriously misguided, that too much money is being poured into the wrong kinds of efforts. Perhaps money that is spent developing art could be better served elsewhere, eg in a public education campaign or even (in my wildest dreams) something less short-sighted than that. However those points will come in future discussions. Meanwhile, this discussion is a start and I hope that you may have found a seed of inspiration from which to go out and create dance that will draw the whole world into your audiences!

Written by Nicola Baartse, 06/07/2000