The world of dance is big!

I've seen a number of blog posts on the topic of the article "Ballet? Never heard of it" by Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal. I wrote a comment on the Great Dance blog, and I know Doug will write more about it, but the more I thought about the article, the more it annoyed me.

Go read the article, it's a lament about how people aren't interested in dance anymore. He backs this up by commenting on how "Dancing with the Stars" is the most popular dance show on TV. Somehow, this is a bad thing? I watched Dancing with the Stars, yes it was cheezy, but the dancers worked hard, and the judges held the contestants to reasonable standards (they even enforced the ban on lifts to keep the dances from disolving into meaningless showboating) No, it wasn't ballet, but it was good dancing.

"So You think You Can Dance" was a big hit too - I think it was rated number one last time? The solos were a lot of cheezy competition-style dancing (I wanted to smack the dancers who steamrolled through their music in double or triple time) but they broke out some solid ballroom moves too. Though I would pay money to see them line up all the contestants in the first episode of the season, and make them Morris Dance. Then we'd see who really thought they could dance. heh.

Seriously, people are not uninterested in dance. People are tuning in by the millions to see people dance. They're just not tuning in by the millions to watch ballet. I mean, do you suppose French-style chefs are sitting around turning up their noses because most people want to eat Italian, Thai, Mexican, African and every other kind of food? Well, ok, they probably are. But could you imagine them claiming that because Mexican food is becoming the most popular in the US, people have lost their interest in food? Would you take them seriously? There are thousands of fine dining restaurants making money hand over fist, but now they cover the whole spectrum of styles and ethnicities of food.

People love dance and creative movement, but there is a finite amount of interest out there, and ballet isn't the only game in town anymore. All this complaining isn't about people losing interest, it's about ballet losing market share. Maybe we can put dance critics, General Motors, and Tab soda in a corner together to comiserate.