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...
No comments:
Post a Comment