30 November 2006

Never heard of dance: The decline and near-disappearance of dance in America.

Ballet? Never Heard of It.
The decline and near-disappearance of dance in America.

BY TERRY TEACHOUT
Saturday, November 25, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page Opinion Journal.

According to the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, conducted every 10 years by the National Endowment for the Arts, the percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 35 who attended one or more ballet performances a year fell from 5.0% in 1992 to 3.1% in 2002. That's a huge drop in a small number, and everybody in the business offers a different reason for why it shrank so fast:

• Not only has dance vanished from American TV, but newspapers and magazines have cut back on dance-related news stories and reviews.

• The quality of new choreography has fallen off significantly.

• Swan Lake"-style classical ballet, with its tutus and Tchaikovsky, is "irrelevant" to today's young people...

...now that the mass media have largely stopped paying attention to high culture, the art-loving public is increasingly unaware of the existence of [new] masterpieces.

...That's why the dance boom went bust. No classics, no stars, only a handful of long-lived institutions . . . so why take a chance on dance? And therein lies the challenge of reviving dance in America: Anyone who seeks to launch a new company, or revitalize an old one, must start by figuring out how to make large numbers of Americans want to see something about which they no longer know anything...

read more here

16 November 2006

Mapping interpretation practices in contemporary art , Questions!

Scottish Arts Council commissioned a report from consultants 'engage Scotland', which was written by Dr Heather Lynch and called Mapping Interpretation Practices in Contemporary Art (published in May 2006).

The aim of this study was to map current interpretation practices of contemporary art in relation to intellectual access.

Interesting premise to start off with. Isn't this what dance artists keep referring to when confused about the lack of general public interest in contemporary dance? Partly we refer to their emotional, instinctive, intuitive, kinaesthetic interest, but what serious dance artists seem to desire is their intellectual interest.

So how did they go about researching intellectual access (to contemporary arts in general and specifically)? They devised main research questions, in consultation with the Scottish Arts Council and representatives from engage.

These were as follows:
• What is the nature of interpretation practices across a range of venues?
• What are the perceived values of the range of practices employed?
• How is intellectual access considered by venues that exhibit contemporary art?

What I want to point out is the nature of the questions they chose to ask. These are open-ended questions, true research questions seeking a result that is not preformulated, or inherently hypothesized within the phrasing. Okay, they could be clearer, and yes, they are somewhat convoluted (who is really going to use this information? what will it actually inform in the end?). However, these questions and the report's answers are precisely of benefit to me and to other dance professionals in Canada. We need broad strokes, an enlarged understanding of the emerging context for dance. We must ensure we relate this information to our own context, and our own sets of knowledge and expertise, and thereafter it offers significant insight into how we can creatively work to solve our challenges of audience development in our nation, in both urban and rural Canada.

- R

08 November 2006

Mobilise and socialise at dance gigs - new motivation research

Social time - Food - Drink - **Show** - Drink - Food - Social time


If we want to increase audiences, we have to feed audiences' motivations for attending, and maybe this involves actually feeding them.

Research from the Urban Institute (USA) offers new insight into different motivations for attending cultural art forms. In "Motivations Matter", the key motivators for dance are time to socialize and to engage the emotions. We could do so much more to add value to audiences' experience, solely by increasing opportunities to socialize with one another and engage emotionally with dance art.

Here's one small example. Having an intermission with a concession goes a long way to providing added value - suddenly there is an opportunity to socialize before, during and after the performance, and a distraction (food and beverages) to help lubricate social engagement and artistic (and perhaps emotional) engagement.

Backing up this idea, here is a post by poet and longtime dance critic Eva Yaa Asantewaa to open up Foot in Mouth's question, If nearly everybody likes to move and watch others move, why are dance audiences so small?

" Are you old enough to remember the days when we would fortify ourselves first and then head off to a dance concert, or perhaps see dance and then replenish ourselves afterwards? Now many dance venues provide refreshments, encouraging audience members to belly up to the bar or chow down to their hearts' content--or ultimate discontent.

...At poet Carl Hancock Rux's recent BAM Next Wave multidisciplinary show, "Mycenaean," I watched a large group of college kids get tickets and then, en masse, head straight to the café counter where popcorn is a major draw. These youngsters had gone from my neighborhood in the East Village--a.k.a. NYU's Food Court, and Theme Park to the World--to another borough where they could exercise their inalienable right to consume." More...

Okay, so inalienable rights to consume is not so great, but the idea of inticing new audiences is great. And as they say, if you want something you don't have, you have to try something you haven't done.

Food is novelty, an available distracting focus, a topic of conversation (especially useful an entrypoint, sort of like the weather). Too, food is calming, reassuring, grounding, and may make them more receptive to what they are about to see. Selling food at dance performance may well be a major draw to bring in new audiences, especially younger ones, families and colleague groups.

- R

Talking about us talking about dance

Apollinaire Scherr's fantastic dance blog "Foot in Mouth" is well worth checking out.
I mentioned her in the last post, but want to raise another point she makes regarding topics for dance writing, and the relationship of these topics to dance talking.

What we write matters, and we need to be mindful of how dance is presented in the media. "What's the story? Same as it ever was" (halfway down the page) is an exposition of the shift in topics in dance writing. I would argue that this has a gigantic impact on how dance is perceived, received and how we as dance artists are not only identified but also our ideas of our own identities.


Here it is:

"What's the story? Same as it ever was

I'm not sure when it started, but the center of gravity for dance writing has now shifted from reviews to features, profiles, and trend pieces.

Flacks love the previews -- advocate for them, are hired to make them happen -- because in the short term they get people into the seats. But they do little in the long term, as they don't adequately prepare a person for what she's going to see.

They tell you about the inspiration for the dance, but not what the dance might inspire. They tell you about the occasion of its making, but not the occasion the dance itself invents. The terms that a preview establishes for the dance can only be approximate, whereas a review -- if it's given enough room and knows what it's doing -- can be precise.

Issues and personality drive features and profiles, while structure and impersonality -- or at least the distillation of the personal -- drive dances. As Croce notes, dancer Sara Rudner is great not because she looks sexy or because she has terrific sex after hours, but because onstage she transmutes disco exhibitionism into lyrical wit. We're not watching Rudner so much as the character of her dancing.

If you ask of dance the classic, cigar-chomping newspaperman question, "What's the story?" the answer will always be, "The dances." Forget the back story -- the drama is in the dances.

Because we have not been writing about these dances particularly well, more and more we're being asked to skip the story. We need to find our way back, with our editors -- and their editors -- in tow. "

That's it. For now.

- R

"How NOT to Write, So Dance Will Matter" or, More context please!


In her article "How NOT to Write, So Dance will Matter", Apollinaire Scherr turns the tail on dance, saying we're culpable for the lack of audience for dance.

Audiences are smart. Dance attenders are saavy. They don't lack knowledge, ability or interest in appreciating dance performance, they lack context.

We're not supplying enough context.

We need to supply more context.


Here's some of her discussion (find these excerpts and the rest of the article here) :

"We've let movement description dominate our reviews for too long. You know, "Miriam Morningflower lifts her leg, whirls, climbs on her partner's back." We show and show and show, when we ought to mainly tell.

Or if a dance reviewer is particularly short on space -- as in the New York Times -- she summarizes each work on the program, then adds opinion for spice: a salty laundry-list review. On the rare occasion that she is granted more space, what does she do? Add more movement description! (If the Times upped the typical wordage to 500, from 350, she'd eventually figure out what to do. Right now, she's caught in a vicious circle: editors aren't generous because writers don't use the extra space well, and writers don't use it well because they haven't had the practice.)

The usual defense is that description is a form of contextualizing. Yes, but an insider's form. If someone already knows about dance, then she knows what it means that a dancer moves in one way rather than another. For everybody else, explication is in order.

...

Description-heavy reviews came to prominence in the '60s among downtown critics of the avant-garde. The reviews resembled the dances themselves: factual, investigative, and not very interesting if you weren't already clued in to the thinking behind them.

Most reviews still resemble those dances, except now there's that sprinkling of snark. What they lack is argument, which is how a civilian figures out what's at stake.

...

The preeminent 20th century dance critic Arlene Croce -- at the New Yorker for more than two decades and somehow mainly remembered for her essay on Bill T. Jones and what she dubbed "victim art" -- never buried dances in an impressionistic haze, and she was parsimonious in her descriptions of passages of movement. But she always made a powerful case for why the dance mattered or didn't -- to all of us, not just readers in the know. And she never presumed that if you didn't know about dance, you didn't know about a whole lot of other things.

...

People won't discover dance until critics express more curiosity and insight about the culture it's wedded to. Since dance isn't sealing itself off from the world, why are we?


When a dance does live in a crypt, though, critics should take note."


I hear people in the dance milieu ask all the time - how can we build audiences for dance? It would be a good start to ask audience them what they lack in dance performance. If it's context, give them context. Experiment (which is what we do in art all the time anyway) and try something new. Maybe audiences will respond to your fresh approach, and maybe you will end up getting what you want.

- R