[PhiladelphiaDANCE.org Listserv] Is Dance a Lesser Art Form?

Wed May 21 20:45:03 EDT 2008

*An interesting article worth sharing and an argument for better dance
education!*

*THE DANCE PROBLEM*

*Is Dance a Lesser Art Form?*

*By Jack Miles & Douglas McLennan*

Of all the major arts, dance seems to have the toughest time attracting
audiences. Theatre companies, museums, symphony orchestras and opera
companies have lean years, even lean decades, but for dance, lean seems to
be a way of life.

Even the world's largest, most-established dance companies continually flirt
with financial ruin:

   - The storied Bolshoi Ballet's theatre is crumbling, its artistic
   reputation has been
battered<http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/09/01/timartthe03003.html>
[The
   Times], and its subsidies from the Russian government have fallen off in
   the past few years. Last fall things got so bad, the president of Russia
   replaced the company's top management.

   - Canada's National Ballet has been laboring under a series of
   million-dollar annual deficits for so long that when it only fell behind
   $165,000 last season, the company put out a celebratory press
release<http://www.nationalpost.com/artslife/arts/story.html?f=/stories/20001030/445339.html>
[National
   Post].

   - After squabbling over how the company should be
run<http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0048/finkle.shtml> [Washington
   Post] and who owns the rights to its founder's choreography, the
   pioneering Martha Graham Dance Company went out of business last fall.
   Despite attempts to revive it in some form, hope is fading.

   - Australia Ballet warned it would have to cut back its programs if it
   didn't get more government support; then after it
did<http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/20000529/A23313-2000May28.html>
[The
   Age], a number of prominent dancers quit the
company<http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/2000/12/17/FFX41D3QQGC.html>
[The
   Age].

   - The English National Ballet is so strapped for cash, it says it can't
   stage the kinds of ballets
   <http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,62-64841,00.html> [The Times] that
   could sustain its artistic mission. Derek Deane, the company's artistic
   director, recently announced he is quitting in frustration. He's the third
   artistic director of a major English
company<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000166941319210&rtmo=Lx7NKxSd&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/00/12/5/btdeane.html>
[The
   Telegraph] to leave in the past year.

 A recent study "Dancing with Dollars in the Millennium," written by
Dance/USA's John Munger, says the 1990s were a lousy decade for
dance<http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf?/entertainment/pd/e01dance.html>
[Plain
Dealer] "Funding dropped. Audiences decreased. 'The Nutcracker' lost its
magical appeal. Major ballets went deeply into debt. Modern dance ensembles
struggled, too."

In recent years American Ballet Theatre has battled major debt. Dance
Theatre of Harlem has teetered. The Joffrey Ballet fled its home and a pile
of bills in New York and relocated to Chicago. And Cleveland/San Jose Ballet
closed its doors<http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf?/entertainment/pd/e29dance.html>[Plain
Dealer]in Cleveland.

Boston Ballet's management squabbles, played out in
public,<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/084/living/Losing_its_balance+.shtml>[Boston
Globe]have crippled it artistically, Boston choreographers say
there'sno support<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/002/living/Boston_Moves_offers_hope_for_local_dance+.shtml>
[Boston
Globe] for their work. Connecticut Ballet decided to take a year
off<http://www.ctnow.com/scripts/editorial.dll?fromspage=AE/genListing/genListing.htm&categoryid=146&only=y&bfromind=352&eeid=2454198&eetype=article&render=y&ck=&ver=hb1.3>
[Hartford
Courant] to ponder whether it can still survive. And 32-year-old Ohio Ballet
is on the brink of
failing<http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf?/entertainment/pd/e20dance.html>
[Plain
Dealer].

Then there's Los Angeles, which has tried numerous times to put together a
viable ballet company, only to see its efforts fall apart. More generally,
choreographers report that virtually an entire generation left the field in
the 90s as dance companies pulled back from commissioning new work.

Dancers' salaries are low; the average corps dancer makes less than a
waitress in a busy coffee shop. And careers are short and precarious. A
University of Washington study reported that dancers suffer a rate of injury
higher than professional football
players<http://www.artspatron.com/story0012dancer.asp> [Arts
Patron] and athletes in other contact sports.

This is only a sampling of a long and depressing list of dance world woes.
But then, everyone knows dance is a tough sell.

*WHY?*

The question is: why? Certainly many of the tales of woe are the result of
poor management (Martha Graham), changing economies (the Bolshoi) or perhaps
outsized expectations (Joffrey). And certainly there are success stories –
the Mark Morris Company, David
Parsons<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/049/living/David_Parsons_brings_diversity_to_dance+.shtml>
[Boston
Globe], Pilobolus, Alvin Ailey <http://www.nymag.com/page.cfm?page_id=1747>
[NYMagazine], Paul Taylor…

But compared to other art forms, dance as an institution is the consumptive
beauty*.* Almost every major city in America has a symphony orchestra, a
museum or two, and a few theaters. Few have successful dance companies. Move
down to second- and third-tier cities, and dance almost doesn't exist.

Nor is there much writing about dance. Of all the arts
ArtsJournal<http://www.artsjournal.com/>monitors daily, stories about
dance are the most difficult to find. The
quality of writing about dance doesn't compare to that about other art
forms, either. Over the past year, we have collected one-tenth as many
stories for dance as we have for music or visual art. And not for lack of
trying. Correspondingly, Arts Journal's Dance
pages<http://www.artsjournal.com/Dance.htm>see the lightest traffic on
the site.

A study last year by the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia
University reported that dance gets only "cursory"
coverage<http://www.najp.org/ra.htm> [NAJP]
in the American press and is rarely covered by a full-time critic.

Classical music critics point to audience estrangement from atonal music in
the second half of the 20th Century as a reason for classical music's
decline with the public. No such claim can be made for dance. Contemporary
dance has continued to evolve and produce stars. Small modern companies do
some of the most exciting work in all of contemporary arts, and the field is
vibrant with new ideas. More traditional companies never stopped offering
plenty of classic fare.

 And yet, even the top companies are a difficult sell when they
tour<http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/arts/docs/limon13.htm>[SJ
Mercury News]outside the largest cities. In any performance art,
touring is a way of
building and cementing reputations, of contributing to the evolution of the
art. But touring for large companies is becoming less and less possible.
Smaller companies can survive only by touring. But that too is becoming
problematic as the venues for presenting dance dwindle.

Is it because dance is too expensive? Not compared to opera, which is
thriving and costs even more to mount. Is it because of lack of commitment
from funders? Through the 70s and 80s dance was heavily supported by the
National Endowment for the Arts dance touring program. And there have been
other major funders. European and Australian governments pour large sums
into supporting their national companies.

But ballet and modern dance struggle. Even the beloved story ballets, which
once could be counted on to draw audiences, seem to have lost their wide
appeal. "Nutcracker," the perennial cash cow for many American dance
companies, has ceased to pack them in
<http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf?/entertainment/pd/e01dance.html>[Plain
Dealer] as it once did.

The obvious place for blame is the lack of education about dance. It's not
that dance is a "lesser" art or harder to understand or more difficult.
Dance outside the traditional ballet/modern companies is doing well –
"RiverDance" and its clones pack in the
audiences<http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/07/09/sticuicui02014.html>
[Sunday
Times] and PBS viewers. As does Stomp. As does
Broadway<http://www.postnet.com/postnet/stories.nsf/ByDocId/CC18D1649A7C4347862568F40053CBE4>
[St.
Louis Post-Dispatch] and shows like *Lion King* and *Bring in Da Noise*.
Ballroom dancing
thrives<http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/03/31/fp19s1-csm.shtml>
[Christian
Science Monitor]. Swing is in, even with the young, or especially with the
young.  As a participatory activity, street and club dancing are popular.

It's that the specialized sophisticated vocabulary of ballet and modern
dance aren't taught in any widespread way in public schools. There are dance
schools in almost every larger community, but dance is almost non-existent
in the public schools, even scarcer than music or art instruction.

Dance as an artform has intrinsic appeal. Though ballet is a fairly recent
development, dance as a means of expression is one of the earliest artforms.
One archaeologist says that dancing as self-expression probably developed
early <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/science/27DANC.html> [NYTimes] in
our cultural evolution, "perhaps as early as speech and language and almost
certainly by the time people were painting on cave walls, making clay
figurines and decorating their bodies with ornaments." That dates dance back
5000-9000 years ago.

Is it possible that because movement is so instinctive, so basic, it is
passed over for instruction in favor of artistic skills that seem to come
less naturally? Anyone can move, so the argument would seem to go, but it
takes training to act or play an instrument or make a painting.

But responding instinctively to movement or music is one thing, acquiring a
basic vocabulary in which to hear and speak critical appreciation is
another. Without that basic vocabulary, any artform is difficult to
appreciate. *Education that fails to provide it for dance virtually ensures
that a general audience for it will never be developed.*
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